Media image of Kizhi island in Soviet magazines of the 1950s and 1960s: formulating the question

The article continues the study of the representation of Kizhi Island in Russian culture, this time based on the material of magazine publications of the 1950s and 1960s. The relevance of the study is determined by the status of the island as a significant cultural locus of Russia, known far beyond the borders of the country. The article deals with the goals and prospects of the study from the point of view of imagology and regionalism, makes preliminary remarks about the chronology of the studied media image formation and sources available for research, and describes their typology and genre range. The author investigates the topics and problems raised by the articles and essays about the island during the time of the Kizhi Museum creation using the material of selected publications from various central and regional magazines (Arhitektura SSSR, Zvezda, Znanie - Sila, Molodaya Gvardia, Na Rubezhe, Nauka i Zhizn, Smena). The material of the publications makes it possible to compare the media image of the island with its concurrently developing literary representation, and to determine their similarities and differences in terms of the time of formation, content, etc. While the literary and artistic discourse about Kizhi Island is dominated by philosophical and aesthetic problems, ethical and existential issues that are typical for Russian literature in general, its media image is largely determined by newsworthy events, the main ones being the creation of a historical and ethnographic museum and the formation of a new tourist route. The analysis revealed a confrontation between two tendencies in the magazine texts: the tendency towards stereotyping stories about the island in the process of the place image formation, on the one hand, and the tendency to overcome stereotypes and search for non-trivial solutions in organizing the text content, on the other hand.