Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.15176/vol51no207
The New (Yugoslav / Soviet) Man in a Little Boy’s Body: Boško Buha and Pavlik Morozov
Danijela Lugarić Vukas
; Odsjek za istočnoslavenske jezike i književnosti, Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
Abstract
Pavlik Morozov and Boško Buha are the first young heroes-victims in Soviet and Yugoslav cultures respectively, who can be seen as models in the process of construing the New Man. These two New Men in little boys’ bodies surprisingly resemble each other on several levels, ranging from visual representation to the articulation of their life paths in cultural texts. Both of them were brave underage fighters coming from rural regions who perished due to their loyalty to ideological regimes, thus becoming victim-idols used by the political elites for the purposes of political manipulation. However, whereas Morozov served as an ideal model for the articulation of different Soviet ideas of the New Man, the image of Buha was a consequence of an entirely different political project and embodied one of the key ideas of the Yugoslav socialism: the one of fraternity and equality. This paper deals with several relevant questions by observing Pavlik Morozov and Boško Buha as “figures of memory” (Assmann 2006) that had a strong mnemonic energy throughout the Soviet and Yugoslav socialist pasts. Firstly, how well known was Morozov in the cultures of the former Yugoslavia and did he serve the political elites as a model for the production of a Yugoslavian prototype of a young sacrifice for the greater good, i.e. for the creation of a (Soviet and/or Yugoslav) New Man in a little boy’s body even in spite of Tito’s “No” to Stalin? Secondly, which “invented traditions” (Hobsbawm) do these two models refer to and why was the Yugoslav government unable to “transfer” the model of Morozov in an unaltered form into the Yugoslav cultural discourse?
Keywords
Boško Buha, Pavlik Morozov, New Man, Stalinism, “Titoism”
Hrčak ID:
130716
URI
Publication date:
15.12.2014.
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