THEMES AND MOTIVES OF VISUALIZATION OF THE ARMENIAN EPIC POEM IN THE COLLECTIVE AND CULTURAL MEMORY OF THE SOVIET ERA OF THE 1980S (based on the story collection for children “To Be Like David of Sasun” by Victoria Vartan and the film “The Road to David of Sasun”)

Simyan T. S.

DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2017-4-11-27

Information About Author:

Tigran S. Simyan Russian-Armenian University, Yerevan, Armenia. E-mail: tsimyan@googlemail.com

The article presents the problem of visualization and its relation to memory types on the example of the series of stories by writer Victoria Vartan “To be similar to David of Sasun” and visual “translation”, that is, the film “The Road to David of Sasun” (1987). The theoretical premise of this article was the ideas of Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, which made it possible to trace and describe the types of memory (individual / subconscious, social, collective and cultural) on the in-text and extra-textual levels of the selected empirical material. The analysis showed that the Armenian national epic does not lose its vitalism and always manifests itself thanks to individual and social memory. In its turn, social memory is “refracted” into a sign form (artistic text, film text) and becomes an asset and part of culture, that is, cultural memory. Impact for the manifestation of the epic material was the didactic intentions of Victoria Vartan with the aim of inculcating the education of the future generation to universal values (humanism, readiness to help the weak and defenseless and the elderly, etc.). In addition the film, in turn, becomes an implicit propaganda tool for raising the spirit on the eve of the maturing Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in the late 1980s.

Keywords: individual memory, social memory, collective memory, cultural memory, visualization of the epic, Armenian epic, epic and cinema

References:

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Assmann 2016 – Assmann Aleida. Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur. Transl. into Russian by B. Khlebnikov. Moscow, 2016.

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Վարդան 1988 – Վիկտորյա Վարդան. Նմանվել Սասունցի Դավթին: Նովելներ, Երևան, «Արևիկ» հրատ, 1988. In Armenian.

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Issue: 4, 2017

Series of issue: Issue 4

Rubric: ARTICLES

Pages: 11 — 27

Downloads: 621