Homo soveticus & homo postsoveticus: models of happiness in Russian literature

Happiness is a complex cultural construct, with many exits into the sphere of life practice, but designed primarily through an artistic text. The article discusses the evolution of happiness concept in Soviet and post-Soviet literature. Initially, modeling of happiness was based on the opposition of the public and the personal. Love was preached, but to an idea, not to a person. Soviet mythology was based on the fact that not family happiness, but the happiness of the struggle to build a new world became the principle conflict of a literary work (P. Pavlenko). But there was another discourse that translated this topic from heroic into tragic (A. Platonov), and later into the dispute form (Yu. Trifonov). In post-Soviet literature, there is no dominant model of happiness, as well as no regulated national idea. Happiness is filled not with general, but with personal meaning. The search for happiness acquires an exclusively individual character: it is either transferred to the “innocent past” (B. Akunin), or is interpreted as overcoming oneself (T. Tolstaya, A. Kabakov, D. Rubina, etc.). Victor Pelevin's novel Secret Views of Mount Fuji (2018) presents a kind of the modern understanding of happiness, with the economic model being a priority, and a new “economic” mythology of happiness being created. The writer considers this a modern form of self-deception and a substitution of reality. In the final part of the article, Boris Akunin-Chkhartishvili's novel Happy Russia (2017), full of reminiscences, is considered as an essay on happiness models in the Soviet and post-Soviet era, and as the development of utopian pictures from different points of view: historical, political, philosophical, theological, and literary ones.