Miracle as an Existential Phenomenon in Soviet Fairy Tale Films of the 1960s

The relevance of the study stems from the specific interpretation of ‘miracle’ as a phenomenon in Soviet fairy-tale cinema of the Thaw period. In these films, the miracle serves as a social marker underscoring extreme unexpectedness and unbelievability together with a highly positive assessment, thus allowing for reflection on non-religious forms of the transcendent. The article aims to identify specific features of the miraculous in the USSR during the 1960s. The objectives of the study are as follows: 1) to identify meaningful social distinctions that the miracle reveals; 2) to describe the unique features of its legitimate forms and their cinematic adaptation; 3) to trace the dynamics of working with fairy-tale folklore, in which the miracle is a necessary structural element. The material for the study consists of Soviet fairy-tale films made during the vibrant and contradictory period of the Soviet Thaw, when, on the one hand, the social and political goals of building communism in the coming decades were being articulated, and, on the other hand, the artistic focus shifted towards the individual, resulting in increased psychologism and attention to the inner world of ordinary people. The main method of research is Niklas Luhmann’s systems-communication approach. In this framework, religion (observation of the unknown) and art (the artistic form of self-description) are viewed as autonomous social systems. The analysis of fairy-tale films reveals that the phenomenon of the miracle migrates from the structurally formalized discourse of the fairy tale to the psychological-existential domain, where the miracle manifests as an irreversible inner transformation of the protagonist in the course of the plot. The miraculous, as opposed to the mundane, the ordinary, and the familiar, exposes distinctions relevant to Soviet society: bourgeois/Soviet; spiritual/material; natural/magical; human/inhuman; humane/ inhumane; external ideological/internal personal; good/evil. Due to the dominance of the programme of cultivating an atheistic worldview, the miracle as a theological concept (divine intervention) is not articulated explicitly but remains implicitly present in the idea of the salvific role of the miracle in an individual's destiny. Love, friendship, loyalty, and critical self-reflection are marked as miraculous and become manifestations of the transcendent, functioning as a moral imperative while at the same time asserting the ineffectiveness of magic and sorcery.

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