Authors

Oksana Hela¹;  ¹ The University of Basel, Switzerland

Discussion

Cartoon, as a separate art style, reflects a unique art world, whose main task is to broadcast a certain idea, rather than photographically reproduce the existing reality. To this end, artists use a wide range of spatial and temporal objects, and other symbolic signs. The macrocosm of the caricature includes such "components of art (artistic objectivity)" as "world of ideas", "world of things", " the art space", "characters' portrait". These elements form a basic set of symbols that in combination with each other help to construct certain images.

One of images that were constructed in the Soviet media was the image of the intelligentsia. The intelligentsia, defined by the party leadership as a stratum among the two main classes (workers and peasants), regularly suffered from all-Soviet repressive campaigns (purges of the 1920s and 1930s, “Zhdanovshchyna”, “Lysenkivschyna”, etc.). In parallel with the physical destruction of the old intelligentsia, the image of the new, Soviet intelligentsia was being formed. 

This paper’s main research tasks are to analyze the approaches and methods of studying the visual language, as well as to consider those ideological narratives and means of expression in graphics that were used to construct the images of the intelligentsia in early Soviet caricature.