HOMO SOVETICUS & HOMO POSTSOVETICUS: МОДЕЛИ СЧАСТЬЯ В РУССКОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ
HOMO SOVETICUS & HOMO POSTSOVETICUS: MODELS OF HAPPINESS IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE

Summary/Abstract: Happiness is a complex cultural construct, with many exits into the sphere of life practice, but designed primarilythrough an artistic text. The article discusses the evolution of happiness concept in Soviet and post-Soviet literature.Initially, modeling of happiness was based on the opposition of the public and the personal. Love was preached, butto an idea, not to a person. Soviet mythology was based on the fact that not family happiness, but the happiness of thestruggle to build a new world became the principle confl ict of a literary work (P. Pavlenko). But there was another discoursethat translated this topic from heroic into tragic (A. Platonov), and later into the dispute form (Yu. Trifonov). Inpost-Soviet literature, there is no dominant model of happiness, as well as no regulated national idea. Happiness is fi llednot with general, but with personal meaning. The search for happiness acquires an exclusively individual character: it iseither transferred to the “innocent past” (B. Akunin), or is interpreted as overcoming oneself (T. Tolstaya, A. Kabakov,D. Rubina, etc.). Victor Pelevin’s novel Secret Views of Mount Fuji (2018) presents a kind of the modern understandingof happiness, with the economic model being a priority, and a new “economic” mythology of happiness being created.The writer considers this a modern form of self-deception and a substitution of reality. In the fi nal part of the article,Boris Akunin-Chkhartishvili’s novel Happy Russia (2017), full of reminiscences, is considered as an essay on happinessmodels in the Soviet and post-Soviet era, and as the development of utopian pictures from diff erent points of view:historical, political, philosophical, theological, and literary ones.

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