The rhetoric of war on the pages of the magazine “Vitchyzna” in the 1940s

Abstract

The subject of the study is the military rhetoric on the pages of the “Vitchyzna” magazine of the 1940s. The author processed two issues of the magazines “Soviet Literature” and “Ukrainian Literature” from 1941, researched and analyzed the content of each periodical according to chronology. The novelty lies in the use of a different toolkit for the analysis of Soviet periodicals, in particular, the less-studied magazine “Vitchyzna” and the determination of its leading role both in publishing and in the literary and artistic space of the 40s of the 20th century. The goal is to analyze the magazine’s system-typological features with the help of the historical context; to determine the specifics of military rhetoric at all its structural levels. The main methods of the study were comparative and systematic-typological, which were used to identify and interpret rhetorical features in the structure of texts and the literary and artistic context of the “Vitchyzna” magazine of the pre-war and war periods. The scholar traced the history of the creation and development of the magazine in the 1940s, which during the studied period had three titles: “Soviet Literature”, “Ukrainian Literature”, “Vitchyzna”. The researcher focused on the constant changes in the editorial staff, chief editors (I. Kulyk, I. Le, I. Stebun and Yu. Yanovsky) and their influence on the magazine’s rhetoric. Having singled out the most important structural and semantic features of both individual artistic texts and various headings (Poetry, Prose, Criticism, Literary and Artistic Chronicle, Bibliography) that unite these texts, she offered to consider the selected material through the prism of war rhetoric.

The results of the research confirmed that war narratives were an integral part of Soviet society both before and during World War II. To reproduce a complete picture of the narratives of the Soviet government, the scholar in the study turns to 1939, which marks the beginning of the full-scale German invasion of Poland (September 1) and the “Winter” Soviet-Finnish War (November 30). Literary characters in poetry and prose from the content of magazines are characterized by excessive heroism and pathos. The system of figurative and poetic expression of the authors of the texts is diversified by rhetorical devices: metaphor, alliteration, anaphora, hyperbolization, juxtaposition of enemies / fighters of the Red Army, humor, identification with the audience (use of the pronoun “we”), appeal to authority. All works are designed for the Soviet reader of the time and are written according to the appropriate Soviet methods.