Authors

Discussion

Since 2014, the Russian Federation has been consistently associated in Ukrainian socio-political discourse with the fictional land of orcs and monsters, Mordor, from the world of Middle-earth invented by Professor J. R. R. Tolkien. Russia itself is called Mordor, its soldiers act as orcs, its officials and officers act as Uruks and Nazgul, and so on. It is not uncommon to come across self-revealing declarations in Russian z-journalism and reactionary science fiction: “We are orcs, and Ukrainians are elves,” as well as attempts to reimagine and re-emphasize Tolkien’s classic story, to make it morally ambiguous or even opposite in meaning to the original stories about Middle-earth.

The longer the war goes on, the more the list of borrowings from classic popular literature and culture to describe everyday military and political realities grows. We can come across references to literary and cinematic universes “Harry Potter” and “Dune,” the multiverse of Marvel comics and films, the Warhammer 40,000 gaming universe in the current press and meme culture in Ukraine and — mainly in memes — in Russia. 

All these references work not only as labels that allow readers to instinctively separate the “good” guys from the “bad” ones, but also as politically charged emblems that generate around themselves, in addition to the obvious pop-cultural ones, also political connotations. 

In my report, I want to explore the influence of the use of pop-cultural emblems on the socio-political discourse in Ukraine, on public opinion, the perception of certain military and political events, as well as on political decision-making. I also want to show the “mechanism of distillation” of mythological images and plots from the space of pure literary pleasure to the space of relevant socio-political meaning using the example of two poems by Vladimir Nabokov — the early Russian-language “Солнечный сон” and the late English-language “The Man of To-morrow’s Lament”. 

In my work, I will rely on the work of the Ukrainian researcher of mass culture Mikhail Nazarenko, on the works of his British colleague John Clute, as well as on the works of Yuri Lotman and Roland Barthes on semiotics and some others.