Historical person in the modern mass-media. Statement of a question

The article is devoted to the consideration of strategies and ways of creating a media image of a historical personality in popular historical journals. The conclusion is drawn that historical figures not only represent interest for mass consciousness as signs of modern and past political events, but also are conditioned by the audience's need for absorption of «meanings». These images fill the media space with discourses and often become a rich material for the creation of various kinds of recreational texts. It is noted that the principle of recognizability of a historical personality plays a key role in communication with the reader, stimulating his interest in publications and journals in general. The article refers to two types of publications: those designed for the average level of competence of the recipient and those that represent the most massive, often aggressive, social stereotypes. The author of the article builds on the concepts of «media image» and «personosphere» and treats the question of reality / virtuality and historical personalities and literary heroes from the point of view of the concept of simulacra and reality as narration. It is noted that the historical figure as such has become the object of almost all universal Russian publications, but most of the materials devoted to recognizable personalities are contained in specialized journals, and that the general seme of hidden truth underlies all the names of these weekly newspapers: «secrets», «secret», «archives», «prohibition». Opposition truth / lie is a successful manipulative technique that allows you to produce a lot of crypto-historical texts. The article concludes that, in terms of using archetypes, such publications are similar in their impact strategies to image-forming texts. This kind of material about historical personalities engender in mass culture debates and disputes, thus forming a pseudo-intellectual media field, covering all spheres of life of the modern reader. If we take into account that the historical personality is one of the forms of manifestation of national identity and the representation of the national myth, then in the mass cultural publications an anecdotal image of the historical figure, its carnival twin, is represented. Multifacetedness and masochism, as best as possible, is realized through stories about various kinds of adventurers (scams) and scammers acting in exceptional circumstances. On these themes, entire narratives are often built in the spirit of adventurous subjects. All these publications are thematically quite predictable and meet the principles of constructing a recreational text. In the body of modern materials, the author of the article identifies several thematic blocks, regularly reproduced by this kind of publications. Separately, the materials of the magazine «Amateur» are considered as the most successful project in the declared aspect. It is asserted that the quality of the publication lies in the content of the materials, the media status of the authors and in the compositional alignment according to the principles of the artistic text of the whole issue.