The Story of a Pilot, Actress and Writer, Told Twice: on the Question of Transforming the Canon of Screen Depiction of the Soviet Prototext

At first glance, it may seem that the large-scale trend, once already designated by the author as a “cinematic discourse on the Soviet” [8, р. 430], has been being implemented unchanged within the contours of the domestic screen discourse for several decades now. Indeed, the number of retrotopic projects offered to the viewer annually since about the beginning of the “noughties” is astounding and difficult to account for. However, the author comes to the conclusion that the designated trend is far from homogeneity, and describes a significant transformation of the canon of screen depiction of the Soviet – both as a collective past and socio-cultural prototext. The starting point for the analysis of the changes that have occurred is the consideration of two products of the fi lm industry – the television series “The Star of the Epoch” (2005) and the feature fi lm “Love of the Soviet Union” (2024), both of which are implemented in the same plot-factual coordinate system and go back to the circumstances of the creative path and personal life of the Soviet actress Valentina Serova. The study established that the eight-part fi lm by Yu. Kara, released in 2005, firstly, reproduces the Soviet in accordance with the principle of “minimal baggage” (the term was coined by L. Bugaeva); secondly, it attempts to critically reflect on the Soviet (at least through voice-over comments), and thirdly, it has a pronounced dramatic nature, emphasizing the melodramatic aspects of the narrative. “Love of the Soviet Union”, on the contrary, portrays the protagonists as almost nothing more than glamorous extras, considering both personal and historical events as a pretext for the development and stylization of the Soviet as an extremely cinematic ecosystem. The creators of the 2024 film, however, are not alone in their conceptual vision and, in fact, “sing” the Soviet in a mainstream tonality – as an unprecedentedly rich pool of tropes and a corpus of pictorial and expressive means, as a style and genre; a kind of Sovietcore. The author believes that such a reduction of the Soviet to decorum not only forms the leading strategems of the on-screen depiction of the Soviet, but, in general, it proves to be the prevalent pattern of its reception by the modern public consciousness. It is noteworthy that such a playful theatricalization of the Soviet turns out to be not only consonant with the “visual modes of being” of the digital era and commercially profitable due to its spectacularity, but acts as an actor, capable of significantly transforming the perception of the Soviet by everyday consciousness; after all, the ideological component is completely extracted from popular narratives.