People of the Four Dimensions: A Social-Artistic-Aesthetic Reflection on Media Reality in the Early Stories of Arkady Averchenko

Authors:

Pages: 66-78
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/ZVGX4493

Abstract:

Since the 20th century, journalism, more broadly – media communications and related phenomena, have gradually become one of the leading factors in the existence of the social and everyday spheres of culture. Averchenko, a professional journalist and satirical writer, was one of the first to feel the approach and comprehend those phenomena that during the twentieth century, and then in the 21st century, would turn out to be the usual habitat and socio-cultural language of an ordinary person. It is not so much about the peculiarities of the mass person and his/her type of consciousness, which has long been the subject of study, as about the foundations, principles and mechanisms of PR-communication, media effects, and the specific conventionality of media-reality, which Averchenko, taking into account the first decades of the 20th century, outlined and described clearly. Using a double coordinate system (the relationship between the view of a journalist and the position of a traditional realist writer entrenched in the Russian socio-literary process), updating it with comic aesthetics, Averchenko managed – in the stories of the 1910s – to discover and show those main threats, traps and problems that implicitly contain media reality.

Keywords:

literature; journalism; literary text; verbal-cultural process; media reality; media influence; Arkady Averchenko

Download

NA