“Nikto ne prosil vas ržat’: lozunghi Monstracii kak rečevoj žanr [“Nessuno vi ha chiesto di sghignazzare”. Gli slogan di Monstracija come genere del discorso]

The paper analyses the slogans of “Monstration”, a manifestation that was held for the first time
in Novosibirsk in 2004 and now has become an important social and cultural event in many other
Russian cities as well as in some other countries. The corpus compiled by the author includes about
4000 slogans and allows, basing on the theory of speech genres, to highlight the main topics and
structural features of this type of texts and to identify their similarities and differences with
the slogans of political manifestations. The study proves that Monstration may be considered
as a form of “linguistic self-defense” and could be compared with the linguistic resistance that existed
in the Soviet Union: the totalitarian language that dominated the public sphere was opposed
by the anti-totalitarian language used in the sphere of personal communication. And one of the main
instruments of the anti-totalitarian linguistic self-defense was irony. It seems that in 2019, the totalitarian
language in Russia was yet at such a stage of development that language resistance was relevant;
however, it was feasible not only in private space (and the Internet), but also manifested itself
in public space from time to time.