The image of a woman in the satirical graphic arts of the Ukrainian magazine “Chervonyy peretsʹ” (“Red pepper”) during the establishment of the Soviet regime in the 20-30s of XX century

Abstract

The article notes that the visual content of satirical Soviet publications of the 20s and 30s of the 20th century becomes an important ideological tool of propaganda through which the mentality of the Soviet person is formed. Understanding the significant role of women and the traditional attitude towards her in Ukrainian society, the Bolshevik regime made the image of women one of the most important propaganda markers on the pages of Ukrainian satirical periodicals of the 20^s and 30^s of the 20^th century. Therefore, in the post-revolutionary period, there is a change in the trend in depicting the image of a woman. On the pages of one of the most popular Ukrainian satirical magazines, “Chervonyy peretsʹ” (“Red Pepper”), a woman mostly appears on the one hand as a frankly propagandistic “poster"” cheerful worker, and on the other – a “nepmansha” and a fashionista, which should arouse condemnation from the viewer. In parallel, in the satirical graphics of the artists of “Chervonyy peretsʹ” (“Red Pepper”) (O. Dovhal,             L. Kaplan, A. Petrytskyi), images of real situations reflecting the life of a Soviet woman in the 20^s and 30^s of the 20^th century are traced, namely: neglect of women's rights, the problem single mothers, social and everyday difficulties of young women with higher education, taboo on sexual awareness, harassment of fashionable girls, etc. In order to fully understand the visual content of the magazine, the work examines propaganda samples of satirical illustrations by N. Karpovsky and B. Fridkin and which highlight the idealized image of a Soviet woman. The article emphasizes that most of the caricatures in “Chervonyy peretsʹ” (“Red Pepper”) have a distinct posterity and conventionality of the image, in which one can observe various modernist currents of the beginning of the 20^th century. The artists of “Chervonyy peretsʹ’ (“Red Pepper”) talentedly and humorously managed to reflect such social problems of women in Soviet Ukraine in the 20-30^s of the 20^th century as: the plight of single mothers, discrimination of women's rights, social and everyday problems of young women with higher education, sexual ignorance, negative attitudes to a fashionable woman, domestic violence. The satirical illustration of “Chervonyy peretsʹ” (“Red Pepper”), like most Bolshevik poster propaganda caricatures, is characterized by a dualistic view of society and life, its division into “before” and “now’, “heroes” and “enemies”.