Maksym Rylskyi’s Journalistic Works and Memoirs as a Source of Analysing Soviet Economic and Manufacturing Practices

Author

Lytvynchuk Nataliia

а Ph.D. in History, a research fellow of the Ukrainian Ethnological Centre Department of M. Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine). ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0691-9662

Maksym Rylskyi’s Journalistic Works and Memoirs
as a Source of Analysing Soviet Economic and Manufacturing Practices

Abstract

Journalistic works and memoir heritage of M. Rylskyi as a potential source complex for studying economic and production practices in the space of Soviet everyday life are considered in the paper. The analysis is based on the articles those cover chronologically the 1935–1964, and published ego-documents of the period of 1907–1956. Studying the content of these works in detail, the authoress has focused on the plots those relate to the economic life of that time directly or indirectly: a factory industry, a collective farming, traditional crafts and trades, etc. It is ascertained that various aspects of the national economy have been often in the writer’s eyeshot. It is followed on which objects and images M. Rylskyi has been focused mainly. The special skill of the author to describe this or that kind of activity inseparably from the space and to depict the loci of economic activity are revealed. At the same time, the special attention is paid to the writer’s vision and manner of information broadcasting. The comparison of various works has showed that M. Rylskyi describes differently the same realities of economic and socio-political life in journalistic essays and materials of personal origin. The articles reflect mostly the official view on the events and phenomena of a Soviet public person. Their content is modelled according to the canons that the system of that time has required, using the appropriate rhetoric and cliches. Instead, the subjects interesting for study are presented in ego-documents in the light of perception of an ordinary person. These are stories that have no distinct ideological content. Information on the research topic is contained in the writer’s narratives about childhood, friends, work, hobbies, travels, etc.

Keywords

journalistic works of M. Rylskyi, ego-documentary heritage of M. Rylskyi, economic and production practices, economic life, space of Soviet everyday life, national economy.

References

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2. RYLSKYI, Maksym. Collected Works: in Twenty Volumes. Kyiv: Scientific Thought, 1987, vol.17: Journalism: 1935–1952, 512 pp. [in Ukrainian].
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