Stereotypes of cultural heroes in comic Internet poetry: Their development and destruction

Abstract

The article analyzes modification of cultural stereotypes about famous people in the postfolklore space of small poetry genres that appeared on the Internet in the 2000s and are usually called stishki (short insignificant poems, sing. stishok). The most popular among them are pirozhki (sing. pirozhok) and poroshki (sing. poroshok). We also consider material from other close genres found at the website “Poetory” — https://poetory.ru: ekspromt (impromptu), depressiashka (depressing poem), dve deviatki (two nines), artishok (artichoke). Both real people and fictional characters are the object of research. The article considers stishki about the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and Clara and Karl, characters from a tongue-twister, as well as the postfolklore ties between Beethoven and Van Gogh. The article traces their ties with other characters, both those existing in a common cultural space (for Gagarin it is Korolev, Titov and the like) and those appearing in poetic postfolklore (for Gagarin these are God and Lenin). The convergence of characters can occur not only on the basis of stereotypes, but also on the basis of random similarities, both external to the language (event, thing) and linguistic (for example, coincidence or consonance of names). The “logic of postfolklore” is described, that is, associative links that connect “distant” characters (separated by time or social standing) and form pantheons of postfolklore heroes.