Political Soviet posters and modern multimodal texts: cognitive experience in the process of perception and categorization of reality

In the work, the attempt to identify the features of the interaction of signs of different semiotic systems in the context of multimodal texts, which are considered as a special information construct and are perceived through the visual communication channel, which combines verbal, graphic, iconic, color codes. The aim of the work was an attempt to make a comprehensive analysis of multimodal political texts, an important element of which is the image of the historical personality of Stalin. This analysis allows us to trace the transformation of the perception and assessment of the life activity of an ambiguous politician in the minds of Soviet and Russian people and, as a consequence, the linguistic society as a whole. The material for the study was Soviet political posters of the mid-20th century and modern multimodal texts, the total number of which was 53 and 67 examples, respectively. The set of methods systematization and generalization, continuous sampling, contextual, intertextual and comparative analysis, is due to the expediency, logic and historical retrospective of the study. This made it possible to reconstruct the cognitive past recorded in the historical consciousness of the people: the article reveals the image of Stalin, in Soviet posters and in modern political multimodal texts, the specificity of perception, categorization and attitude of Soviet / Russian society to its past and present is revealed. For example, the image of Stalin on the posters of the 1930-1953s is as idealized and metaphorical as possible, which is due to the manipulative function – the need to promote the cult of the personality: the themes of patriotism, duty and beneficence become the leading ones and are called upon to form in the mass consciousness a stable, deliberately positive idea of the bright communist future the whole country and its every single Soviet citizen. In modern multimodal texts, it can be noted that they reflect two diametrically opposed views on the personality and life of Stalin: on the one hand, a positive, idealized image of a politician, a nostalgic perception; on the other hand, there is a negative (ironic) view of the “situation of the past,” which is due to the historical context, the cult of the individual and his debunking of this cult after the death of the leader. The specificity of these types of texts is largely due to the author’s linguistic pragmatic attitude and extralinguistic factors.