Почему не было «чистого социалистического реализма»? О грязи и чистоте в советском идеологическом дискурсе о культуре раннего хрущевского времени
Why There Was No “Pure Socialist Realism”? Dirt and Cleanness in the Soviet Ideological Discourse About the Culture in the Early Period of Khrushchev’s Rule

Summary/Abstract: The two opposing terms of CLEANNESS – UNCLEANNESS (DIRT) definitely belong to the obvious metaphorical dichotomies used in the Soviet ideological discourse. Taking into account the character of these terms, emphasised by many researcher, they are actually an ideal tool for polarisation of the presented world into the spheres of US and THEM. This relationship between discussed categories, closer than in other cases, results from a perception of dirt as something foreign, something that does not fit into its surroundings and destroys the accepted order. However, only 24 instances of the terms of cleanness and dirt, reflecting the ideological dichotomy US-THEM, were found in the studied texts. As the discussed opposition is semantically related to a category of strangeness, while the terms of cleanness and dirt represent connotations and associations desirable from the point of view of the propaganda of the day (activity, order, regularity, etc., versus passiveness, disorganisation, randomness, etc.), this number is surprisingly low, considering even definitional association of the term of dirt with the term of strangeness. Apparently, this is caused by two factors. One of them is a strong association of the adjective чистый with one of the leading slogans of the “bourgeois” art (чистое искусство), and the second is a civilisationally determined perception of a “dirty” enemy as less dangerous.

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