Poetics of Naive Love (Based on Soviet Handicraft Photo Postcards of the 1950s)

In the 1950s in the USSR, there was a handicraft production of photo cards. These cards reveal such topics as “love”, “memory”, “greeting, congratulation”, “future life”. The pictures show the portraits of actresses and actors, old West-European greeting cards, and staged (artificially created) photos. It was a continuation of the traditions of Russian ‘lubok’ prints, notes (recordings) in albums, moralistic poetry. Our linguistic interest focuses on the inscriptions on these postcards, from the simplest phrases, such as “Greetings from the Crimea” or “Keep me in mind!”, to more complicated 2–4 line verses, resembling poetry. The article analyzes these texts, representing the typical mass culture of the middle of the twentieth century. Their emotional scope is relatively poor. The most frequent words here are “love”, “remember”, “heart”, “friendship”, “meeting”. Verb forms include only the 1st and 2nd person forms (denoting virtual communicators). The article analyzes the cultural aspects of this genre. The texts on the postcards have positive (optimistic) orientation. This genre is compared to another genre of mass literature – the texts of contemporary pop songs.