Authors

Discussion

“Swan Lake” (1877) was the first ballet that Pyotr Iliych Tchaikovsky composed over the course of his musical career. Its characters—Prince Siegfried, Princess Odette, and the sorcerer Baron von Rothbart—present to a viewer a story of opposition between dark magical powers and a regular flow of human life. Without any strict connection to the Russian national culture, “Swan Lake” over time became a globally renowned cultural artefact. Yet starting in 1982, this work began to acquire new meanings. No longer merely an artistic work designed to bring aesthetic pleasure to its viewers, “Swan Lake” became a political emblem. Vague at first, its political message became more and more emphatic in its satirical message starting in 1982, with the death of the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Leonid Brezhnev. This paper is an attempt to trace a semiotic evolution of “Swan Lake” from a story about defending true love threatened by dark power to an emblem of Soviet Imperial disintegration and of Russian political resistance.