Cultural codes of person's head and face in Russian visual arts of the 1960's and 1980's: reconstruction experience

Cultural code definition implies a set of key concepts, attitudes, norms and values in the mentality of a particular human community, together forming a kind of “transition” from meaning (generally recognized designation of an object, phenomenon) to sense (an element of the particular culture's language). Reconstruction of cultural codes is carried out by comparing the meaning of any objectified result of human activity with its meaning in the cultural context in question. The analysis of the somatisms “head” and “face” in the works of Russian painting and sculpture of the 1960s-1980s allowed to reveal the following basic cultural codes in the mental structures of public consciousness of Soviet society of this period: the terrible memories of the horrors of the live through war are inextinguishable in the memory of generations; the heroes of time are men and women, strong in spirit and body, ready to concentrate and purposefully perform their duty; another type of hero - intellectual thinker, in a debilitating spiritual search for answers to eternal questions of existence; a simple, ordinary man of the era closer to the 1980s increasingly perceived as an impersonal man of the masses, losing his spiritual individuality under the pressure of social circumstances.