MOBILIZING MEANINGS: M.V. NECHKINA'S INTERPRETATION OF LITERARY DECEMBRISM (ON THE EXAMPLE OF A. D. ULYBYSHEV'S LITERARY WORK "THE DREAM")

The article investigates the rhetorical techniques used by the Soviet historian M. V. Nechkina in her monograph The Decembrist movement while analyzing The Dream, a literary work by Ulybyshev (member of a social organization The Green Lamp). The theoretical basis of the study is Roland Barthes' idea of connection between rhetoric, ideology and connotations. The article demonstrates that Nechkina was in a very difficult situation. She had to find balance between the requirements of the Soviet regime to the text of the historical research and the official view of the Decembrist movement, on the one hand, and the text of the historical source that does not allow to draw the necessary ideological conclusions, on the other hand. Therefore, she resorted to the help of rhetoric. The ideology in the text was a secondary connotative sign system built over the primary denotative system of the scientific text.The analysis of lexics allows to identify two groups of connotations in Nechkina's text: the connotation of Ulybyshev's revolutionary views, as well as the connotations of M. V. Nechina's agreement to the anticosmopolitan campaigns. Refs 19.