THE INVENTION OF LONELINESS IN THE LATE SOVIET UNION: ON THE HISTORY OF A DISCUSSION
Keywords:
discussion about loneliness, dating service, discursive transfer, articulation, discovery of the social problem, experts, human sciences in the USSR, cybernetics, late socialismAbstract
The article is devoted to the discursive discovery and subsequent framing of loneliness in the late Soviet society. The author is interested in how, in the late 1960s Soviet Union, the phenomenon of loneliness, previously described by international journalists as a consequence of the capitalist system, along with mass homelessness, unemployment, alienation, and atomization, was discovered, ideologically neutralized, and became part of the social policies of the late Soviet state. The article describes a meeting held in the editorial office of Literaturnaya Gazeta on June 20, 1967, where a closed discussion about loneliness took place. The purpose of the discussion was to discuss an article by a Czechoslovak journalist about the experience of discovering loneliness in the Czechoslovak SSR, developing strategies for describing it and inventing ways of overcoming it, such as marriage advertisements in rural and urban newspapers, as well as specialized dating services that provided professional help in finding a soul mate. The author defines the conditions for the emergence of such a discussion and approaches to the recruitment of experts who were part of the editorial policies of the renewed Litgazeta and the representation of Soviet human sciences in the space of public media. The paper examines the post-war history of the transformation of discussion as a special kind of discursive genre and practice of social interaction sensitive to changes in the system of social relations. It also focuses on the struggle between different discourses to define the meaning of loneliness during the discussion. The author turns to the discourse analysis model developed by Laclau and Mouffe to investigate the course of this struggle and to identify political implicatures in the speeches of the discussion participants. A list of discourses used by experts to fix the meaning of loneliness has been identified, and antagonistic continua of meanings have been revealed. These meanings shaped the strategies of institutionalization of loneliness that followed the discussion.References
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