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«Просто встретились два одиночества»: позднесоветское одиночество и управление контактом
The article is devoted to the study of late Soviet loneliness and organisational solutions to overcome it. The author turns to the study of networks of social relations that constitute loneliness, material artefacts that mediated the establishment of contacts between lonely people, the composition of socio-technical infrastructures that set the routes of movement of people, things and information. The author shows how the recognition of loneliness in the newspaper discussions of the 1970s-1980s as a spatial problem with specific places of geographical concentration led to the development of complex topological solutions. The emergence of evenings of communication, peculiarities of their spatial and temporal structure are considered. The principle of their functioning, which allowed adapting cultural and mass events to the task of moderating the dating of singles, is demonstrated. The appearance of marriage advertisements in the Soviet press in the post-war period is examined as a result of cultural transfer. The influence of the materiality of communication, which allowed contact between lonely people from different parts of the Soviet Union, on the organization of connectedness is examined. The dating service is examined as an institution that combined pre-existing technical solutions, to which was added a card index of questionnaires, described as a repository of loneliness. The role of the computer and the landline telephone in providing contact for singles was shown. The sources of the research were materials from the central press, letters of lonely people from the funds of «Literaturnaya Gazeta», transcripts of expert meetings in the editorial office, memoirs, fiction and the 1976 documentary film «Razreshite poznakomit'sya...» about the first attempts to overcome loneliness in an organized way.