Genre-Stylistic Features of the Student Press of the Sovietization Era (Based on Materials from the Newspaper «Rekonstruktor», 1929–1930)

Abstract

This article examines the genre and stylistic features of the newspaper «Rekonstruktor» — a fortnightly publication of the proletarian student body, academic staff and administrative staff of the Kyiv Agricultural Institute (KAI, now the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine) in 1929–1930. The relevance of this research stems from the need to fill gaps in the history of Ukrainian journalism during the transition from the policy of ‘indigenisation’ to the policy of terror, when the student press became a key instrument in the Sovietisation of higher education and the ideological formation of the ‘new man’. The aim of the article is to identify and systematise the genre and stylistic features of the newspaper ‘Rekonstruktor’ as a specific media text of the Sovietisation era, and to determine the role of linguistic means in shaping the publication’s ideological content. A range of methods was employed in this study. The method of analysing documentary sources was applied whilst working with archival copies of the newspaper «Rekonstruktor» to determine the thematic scope of the materials and establish the regularity of the use of particular genre forms. The historical-typological method made it possible to identify the characteristics of the student newspaper ‘Rekonstruktor’ as a type of mass-circulation newspaper. Content analysis served as the primary tool for identifying genre varieties of the materials, analysing thematic dominants, identifying the main linguistic and stylistic markers of the publications, as well as the degree of their recurrence. Discourse analysis was utilised when interpreting the texts within a socio-political context. Using material from 26 surviving issues of the publication, the study analysed the system of genres characteristic of the Soviet institutional press during the transition period: informational (chronicle, note, announcement), analytical (editorial, correspondence, report) and literary-journalistic (feuilleton, poem, essay). The study examines how the ideological tasks of class struggle, collectivisation and the ‘cultural revolution’ distorted traditional genre forms, giving them a propagandistic character. Dominant stylistic markers have been identified: the rhetoric of hostility, the binary oppositions of ‘us/them’, proletarian ideologemes, and the language of command and challenge. It is shown that the student newspaper functioned simultaneously as an ideological apparatus and as a real platform for discussion, self-expression and even literary creativity.