What is good: to the history of evaluative adjectives in the language of the early Soviet period
- DOI
- 10.5922/2225-5346-2025-3-11
- Pages
- 169-188
Abstract
The article is devoted to the semantic evolution of the evaluative adjectives ‘horoshii’ and ‘plohoi’ (‘good’ and ‘bad’) in the early Soviet language. Through the use of party documents, propaganda slogans, letters to the government and literary texts of the 1920—1930s, the article reveals how these words turned into universal markers reflecting conformity to new social and political standards. The first part of the article analyzes the role of the adjective ‘good’ as a universal rhetorical tool used to create an optimistic image of socialist reality. This word gradually loses its subjective evaluative value, turning into a standard ideological stamp symbolizing positivity and conformity to socialist norms. The second section discusses the reinterpretation of the concept of a good person and the emergence of the opposition between a good person and a good communist, where the former remains the bearer of personal virtues and the latter — the embodiment of socialist ideals. The concept of a true person is seen as a compromise between these categories. The third section is devoted to the metaphorical concepts of strength, resilience, and reliability, which become central to the description of Soviet man and social structures. These characteristics, formed on the basis of technical metaphors, reflect the industrial and collectivist spirit of the era. The methodology includes discourse analysis and semantic research, which make it possible to examine how language, in shaping normative concepts, becomes a crucial instrument of ideological influence by consolidating socialist values through the semantic transformation of everyday language.