“MUSEUMS” OF THOSE BORN IN THE USSR: IMAGES OF SOVIET EVERYDAY LIFE IN NINA KURYATA'S NOVEL “DZVINKA…”

The purpose of this study is to characterize the specifics of the author’s poetics of Soviet everyday life in Nina Kuriata’s novel “Dzvinka. A Ukrainian Born in the USSR”. To achieve this goal, the author describes the images of everyday things through the worldview of the child character and draws attention to the problem of doublethink in Soviet society. The author condemns the primitiveness of everyday life as the ideological essence of total communist domination.The study uses several methods: formal, comparative-historical, comparative-comparative, and biographical.It has been found that the images of toys, clothes, school supplies, homemade food, etc. have the effect of documentary photography and illustrate memories of the experience. The main meanings in the depiction of Soviet everyday life are paradoxical; emphasizing the absurdity and inconsistency with people’s needs; contrast between ideological and spiritual values; irony in revealing the “Soviet” adaptability; subtextual generalizations. The contrast between the two worlds – the domestic (personal) and the public (collective) – is represented by visual images: a cross and an October Revolutionary star, church banners and a red flag as a symbol of a communist holiday. Contextual antithesis is used to emphasize the differences in the family environment: luxury in the city apartment of the KGB uncle and simplicity in the rural house of the Dzvinka family.It is emphasized that the concept of home, the “apologetics of home”, is crucial in the artistic reception of Soviet everyday life. The author’s reinterpretation of the past relies on places of memory, and the image of things ensures the museumization of the space of memories.Nina Kuryata’s novel reveals two artistic time-spaces: 1) visual (reconstruction of past events), where images of things provide retrochronicles and play the role of museum exhibits; 2) sensual (reflection of the author’s memory), where objects are perceived as objects of critical analysis of the experience.The study of the poetics of Soviet everyday life in Nina Kuriata’s novel opens up the possibility of further research into this problem in other texts of fiction about the colonial past.