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Изобретение одиночества в позднем СССР: к истории одной дискуссии
The article is devoted to the discursive discovery and subsequent framing of loneliness in the late Soviet Union.
The author is interested in how, in the Soviet Union of the late 1960s, the phenomenon of loneliness, previously described by international journalists as a consequence of the capitalist system along with mass homelessness, unemployment, alienation and atomisation, was discovered, ideologically neutralised and became part of the social policies of the late Soviet state.
The article describes a closed discussion in the editorial office of Literaturnaya Gazeta, which took place on 20 June 1967. The purpose of the discussion was to discuss an article by a Czechoslovak journalist about the experience of discovering loneliness in the Czechoslovak SSR, developing strategies for describing it and inventing ways of overcoming it, such as marriage advertisements in rural and urban newspapers, as well as specialised dating services that provided professional help in finding a soul mate. The conditions for the emergence of such a discussion and approaches to the recruitment of experts who were part of the editorial policies of the renewed Litgazeta and the representation of Soviet human sciences in the space of public media are defined. The post-war history of the transformation of discussion as a special kind of discursive genre and practice of social interaction sensitive to changes in the system of social relations is examined.
Particular attention is paid to the struggle of discourses for the signification of loneliness that unfolded in the course of discussion. The author turns to the discourse analysis model developed by E. Laclau and S. Mouffe to investigate the course of this struggle and to identify political implicatures in the speeches of the discussion participants. A list of discourses whose resources were used by experts to fix the meaning of loneliness was identified, and antagonistic continuums of meanings were revealed, the special constellation of which shaped the strategies of institutionalisation of loneliness that followed the discussion.