The "Lost Generation" in the Modern Russian-language Journalistic Discourse

Van Shoin Postgraduate student, Department of Russian Language, Lomonosov Moscow State University 89/2 Leninsky Prospekt str., Moscow, 119313, Russia shoin.van@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Zhdanova Larisa Aleksandrovna PhD in Philology Associate Professor, Department of Russian Language, Faculty of Philology, Lomonosov Moscow State University 119191, Russia, Moscow, Leninskie Gory str., 1 zhdala@mail.ru

The formation of generations is culturally significant and is not only experienced by society, but also embodied in artistic creativity: let us recall such different, but united by "generational" themes of works as "Hero of Our Time" by M. Y. Lermontov, "Fathers and Children" by I. S. Turgenev, "Generation P" by V. Pelevin. As a result of artistic interpretation of collective historical experience, author's names appear, which eventually become precedent phenomena ^{[2, p. 82]}. For example, the expression children of the XX Congress belongs to E. A. Yevtushenko ^{[3, p. 11]}, the greatest generation is taken from the title of the book by American journalist T. Brokaw ^[4], the expression lost generation is attributed to Gertrude Stein, it was introduced into wide use by E. Hemingway ^{[5, p. 773]}.

 The semantics and compatibility of the generation lexeme are described in ^{[6, pp. 121-131]}, but the aspect we are considering is practically not touched upon in this work. The expression lost generation is a literary term. To quote the "Literary Encyclopedia of Terms and Concepts": "PP usually refers to people who went through the First World War, spiritually traumatized, lost faith in the patriotic ideals that once fascinated them, sometimes internally devastated or acutely aware of their restlessness and alienation from society" ^{[5, p. 773]}. The term is used in relation to the writers themselves (E. Hemingway, E. Remark, R. Aldington and others), as well as to their characters and contemporaries. The term is widely known and can be considered a stable precedent nomination, the exact meaning of which, however, is not always known to modern native speakers, we note that the original meaning of the term does not contain a negative assessment of the designated generation.

To find out how modern young educated native speakers of Russian use and interpret this nomination, we conducted a linguistic survey in which 35 respondents participated – students of the humanities faculties of Moscow State University. The linguistic survey included tasks: Are you familiar with the expression "lost generation"? If you answered the previous question in the affirmative, then indicate which years you correlate this generation with, and give a brief description of it.

100% of respondents answered positively to the first question.The answers to the second part of the task are presented in Table 1. The numbering reflects the unification of the same type of answers into invariants (in descending order of the frequency of responses). Underlining highlights fragments that are important for further analysis.

Table 1.Years in the answers

The border of the lost generation in most of the agreed answers is indicated as born in the XXI century / after 2000. Since all respondents belong to the age group of 16-23 years, they consider their generation to be lost, although sometimes they note that the negative assessment is not their own, but expressed by representatives of previous generations (parents, grandparents). The main features of their generation, indicated in the answers, are an attempt to motivate a negative assessment expressed in the attribute: irresponsible, know little, do not get carried away with anything, lazy, have no prospects, etc. (the corresponding fragments of the answers are underlined in Table 1). A significant characteristic of the generation is a good command of a computer, the Internet and other modern technologies. Even this seemingly positive property in the answers is presented as negative (young people who are only interested in computers, absorbed by the Internet), which, as it seems, is not so much self-criticism as a retelling of other people's words. Thus, it can be assumed that the use of the lost generation syntagma in relation to modern youth does not belong to the youth speech itself, but is common in the speech of older age groups.

Two more are close to the most frequent value of ‘modern generation’ discussed above, which are presented in fewer agreed answers than the original terminological meaning, therefore they received numbering 3 and 4 in Table 1. Four respondents believe that every new, younger generation receives a negative assessment from previous generations (one of the answers is permanent term – we indicated in Table 1 instead of dates, which for obvious reason are absent in the responses of these respondents). Two respondents attributed the negative characteristic not to their generation, but to the next, younger one (guys who are just going to school).

The second in terms of the number of agreed answers is the original terminological meaning (in more or less precise formulations). Note, however, that in the aggregate, the answers in which the term is understood not as an idiom, but as a determinologized free phrase with an evaluative attribute are significantly more frequent (ratio 29 / 6).

In four responses, respondents consider the generation of compatriots born or growing up during the period of perestroika to be lost, in three – the era after the Decembrist uprising.

Let's compare the data obtained as a result of a linguistic experiment with the data obtained as a result of the analysis of contexts selected from the National Corpus of the Russian language ^[1]. For the lost generation query, 31 contexts were found in the main subcorpus, 81 contexts were found in the newspaper subcorpus. Thus, we have analyzed 112 contexts. There are 18 terminological uses among them, for example: The Lost Generation: unburied soldiers of the First World War were honored in London ^{[1, 2018]}. The term in most of these uses is used to draw parallels with modernity, although in accordance with the original meaning (references in contexts to the 1920s XX century, the First World War, E. Hemingway, E. Remark, Gertrude Stein and others.). However, in the vast majority of contexts, the term lost generation is determinologized (exceeding the terminological usage by more than 5 times) and is applied both to different generations of people in Russian history and modernity, and more narrowly – in relation to certain spheres of activity (football, biathlon, rock music, theater, etc.).

Context analysis allows us to identify the following non-terminological values presented in Table 2.

Table 2. Type of use

         Let's comment on the selected types of use.

1. Due to the fact that the material in the National Corpus of the Russian Language represents a fairly wide time range and is introduced with some lag, the contexts in which the meaning of "young generation" is realized do not correlate with modern youth in a narrow sense (as in the survey reflected in Table 1), but with a broader time range. The basis for combining contexts of different years into one invariant is an explicit juxtaposition of "fathers" and "children" with a negative assessment of "children", an explicit indication of repeatability (the next generation), attribution of the nomination to the modern authors of youth contexts (with a sufficiently wide time range) All this makes it possible to highlight the meaning of ‘youth' without chronological attribution.

Within the framework of the type of usage, a subtype is highlighted (a shade of meaning separated by two slashes) due to the fact that in a large number of contexts there is an explanation of why the younger generation is lost, and the main motivation is the lack of goals and ideals, which is usually associated with a lack of attention and education: Children did not go to school for three-four years, this is a lost generation" ^{[1, 2001]}. In most such contexts, the attribute expresses a negative assessment, which is synchronous or prospective (there are deictics present or future, verb forms in the present or future tense are lost, we will grow up and under.) Cf.: That's what it means – a lost generation…Young people clearly lack an inner core. it can be noted that there is a lack of proper family upbringing, they have not formed proper behavioral models. ^{[1, 2012]}; If we do not immediately turn our youth, our children, then we can simply lose a generation ^{[1, 2012]}. A significant number of contexts related to the topic of education are prospective, however, in general, the sample is dominated by retrospective contexts or contexts where an "assessment from the future" is assumed, for example: I think historians will mark our youth as a "lost generation" ^{[1, 2002]}; A lost generation, whose representatives, as many parents feared and the teachers, who were born in the early 90s, demonstrate a remarkable depth of thought ^{[1, 2011]}.

2. The following type of usage of the expression lost generation is quite far from the original terminological meaning and is a specialization of the meaning of ‘youth'. The nomination retrospectively denotes failures, professional failure in some narrow field, mainly in sports. Two subtypes can be distinguished here: 1) with a negative assessment and explanation in the context: young people showed great hopes, but did not justify them – examples in the Table; 2) with an explanation of the historical circumstances that caused professional failure and with sympathy: The lost generation of Russian rock. This book tells about bands and musicians who were too young to join the discordant ranks of the underground, but appeared too early to perform at stadiums and on the radio ^{[1, 2014]}.

3. The type of usage ‘people who participated in local wars of the XX-early XXI centuries’ is most semantically related to the original terminological meaning. In most contexts, we are talking about the severe consequences of the experience of war and problems with adaptation in society. It should be noted that there are contexts related to different countries, and that the nomination does not apply to people who survived the Second World War.

4. The only generation clearly chronologically attributed in a large number of contexts (other than the one designated by the original term) is the 1980-90 generation, or the "perestroika generation" (and one context in the sample refers to the era of the "thaw"). Note that in such contexts, as in the original term, there is usually no negative assessment, usually regret or sympathy is expressed for the generation whose youth coincided with the "era of change". (In attributive syntagmas with the word generation, as chronological reference points are most often used to indicate significant events in world or national history that occur at the time of growing up, and not the birth of people who make up this generation. Cf.: The Eighties are not people born in the 80s, these are people who were socially born in the 80s ^[7]).)  Note also that the division of the succession of births / maturation of people into generations usually occurs after some time, which allows us to comprehend the socio-historical context that formed the community. In a number of contexts, a motivation is given, an explanation of why the generation is evaluated in this way. Cf.: 1985. He, with sympathy: You are the "lost generation". I, with a young enthusiasm: "Why is this?" He, wisely: "The established culture is collapsing, it will be – I don't know what will happen there, but you are caught between two fires ^{[1, 2010]}.

5. Rare (only 4 contexts), but noteworthy is the attribution of the expression lost generation to socially unprotected groups of people (unemployed and pensioners – see Table 2 for examples). The interesting thing here is that usually the expression lost generation is applied to young people (even in cases when the author is clearly not young, retrospection highlights the period of his youth or maturity ... my generation is a lost generation that lived the happy years of the "thaw" ^{[1, 2010]}). In two contexts, however, we are talking about pensioners, that is, the older age group. In this case, there may be a language game, but the contexts given in the corpus are not enough to state this confidently. 

Conclusions. The calcified term in question is a two-word idiom that includes a noun generation and an attribute with a characterizing meaning, therefore it can be used regardless of the original meaning and cultural and national specifics and thus be determinologized. The term is a precedent phenomenon: 100% of respondents identified it as a familiar reproducible composite nomination, that is, they had heard it before. Comparison of the experimental results and analysis of the contexts of the National Corpus of the Russian language shows their significant consistency. Both in the survey and in the corpus, terminological usage is quite frequent (the second most frequent among all the selected types), however, it is significantly inferior to the totality of non-terminological uses. The only clearly chronologically attributed generation (other than the one designated by the original term) is the "perestroika generation". Determinologized uses in the vast majority of cases belong to the younger generation, the opposition of "fathers" and "children" is actualized, and the attribute lost becomes negatively estimated. The specialization of meaning is noteworthy, presented in a significant number of contexts: ‘people who did not justify the hopes placed on them in the professional sphere'. Thus, two lines of semantic development of the de-etymologized term are distinguished: with the preservation of the semantic component ‘unfavorable external conditions for a young person’ (war, the era of change) and with the promotion of the core meaning ‘lack of purpose, failure' and a negatively evaluative component.