Authors

Mikhail Vodopyanov¹;  ¹ University of St Andrews, UK

Discussion

How do contemporary public figures negotiate their participation in the changing social and political discourse of Russia in the 2020s? What discursive shifts in self-presentation can be observed in the process of this negotiation between present and past, and what role does nostalgia play in the discursive construction of the present?

This paper considers these questions by conducting discourse analysis in an examination of Tatyana Tolstaya’s non-fiction output, with particular attention to social media texts produced and distributed on Tolstaya’s Facebook page to a public audience of more than two hundred thousand followers.

Tolstaya (b. 1951), as a prominent Russian writer and public intellectual from the Tolstoy family, has since the 1980s played a significant role in the discursive reframing of the Soviet past, often viewed through the lens of nostalgia in her current work.

Tolstaya’s participation in public discourse has shifted significantly in recent years, from roles as a writer, television talk show host, and publishing new editions of her earlier writings. In the 2020s, Tolstaya’s discourse has shifted to an emphasis on experimenting with new business ventures: her social media participation describes activities such as producing and selling nuts with her own signature flavours, baking flatbreads according to her ‘nannie’s recipe’, and making limited-edition Christmas cakes. Her latest ventures include a luxury trip curated by herself on the ‘Volga-Dream’ cruise ship (September, 2023). Tolstaya describes and promotes these activities via non-fiction texts on her Facebook, and uses a variety of discursive strategies to influence her online audience.

To analyse these strategies, this paper employs a theoretical framework informed by discourse analysis approaches developed by Fairclough (1989, 1995) and Wodak (1996, 2008, 2016, 2022).