Abstract of Performing The Communist Myths: The Afterlife Of An Orphaned Myth by Ksenia Keren Faingersh, Ph.D., Brown University, May 2014 This thesis explores the “afterlife” of the various Soviet ideological and historical myths, which have succeeded to adapt when placed within a different socio-political frame of post-Soviet Russia. In the beginning of Perestroika, the orphaned myths have been persecuted, dethroned and trampled down; the crisis of the 90s breathed new life into them, providing ground for their renewed relevance and fortification. The analysis is narrowed down to several of the most prominent iconic myths – the quintessential myths of identity: the myth of Lenin, the myth of Stalin, the myth of Pavlik Morozov. Treating the mythical structure at the level of the sign (resorting to structuralist linguistics), the dissertation examines the different modes and patterns of rejuvenation & reincarnation of myth, the tactics of survival. Each of the three iconic Soviet myths examined in this thesis illustrates a different kind of myth – the “ultimate signifier myth” of Lenin, the “eternal signified myth” of Stalin and the “archetypal, symbolic myth” of Pavlik Morozov: each has its unique mechanism of survival in the post-Soviet space. Additionally, this thesis demonstrates that – however different structurally - each of the different myths uses performativity (rigorously linked to a state of liminality) as a means of survival and reproduction. This dissertation, thus, focuses mainly on contemporary plays (of the 90s and the 2000s) and theatrical productions that reveal performative potentials of the orphaned Soviet myths by disassembling and reassembling them in the post-1989 political space.
Faingersh, Ksenia Keren,
"Performing Communist Myths: the Afterlife of an Orphaned Myth"
(2014).
Slavic Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z028060X
