My dissertational research covers the images of the entire Soviet intelligentsia, precisely – the European part of the Soviet Union in the period from 1922 to 1991: the Byelorussian, Russian, Ukrainian and Estonian SSR.
A caricature is a rather complex construct that, by ridiculing certain shortcomings, creates a special reality. Its main goal is to broadcast a certain idea, and not to display the existing reality. Therefore, in this sense, we can call a caricature a simulacrum.
Based on this idea, the “special” world of caricature requires a special “reading”. The uniqueness of the pictorial language of caricature is due to the close combination of iconic elements (signs-images) with phraseological units. The latter are based on the deep cultural codes of a particular society. That is, the graphic and verbal components of cartoons are closely related to socio-cultural, ideological and other codes, which include iconic, conventional, "mimic-graphic" signs (marked gestures and movements of the character). Since a caricature is an image of ideas, there are special channels for transmitting information that broadcast certain figurative, subject and spatio-temporal situational contexts. These contexts or "worlds" form as a result an idea that is read by the recipient and perceived as something integral. “The world of the image/work” is a multidimensional, artistically reproduced reality. The most significant elements of this world are characters, which, in combination with situational contexts, form plots and/or images. The macrocosm includes what is called the "components of representation (artistic objectivity)": "the world of ideas", "the world of things", "artistic space", "portrait of characters". An artist-cartoonist can either use both one channel of information or combine them with each other.
Despite the fact that the intelligentsia, according to the well-known formula “2+1”, was not attributed to a separate class of Soviet society, however, in the cartoons we can talk about the allocatåion of a special place for this “stratum”, where those who worked in intellectual professions are opposed to workers and peasants. During the period under study, caricature art was aimed at creating the image of a single Soviet people without national, and in some periods, class differences (an attempt to blur the boundaries between workers, peasants and intelligentsia). Despite the above-mentioned dominant accents of the Soviet metanarrative, we can detect many cultural and value differences in various images of the Soviet intelligentsia.
