IMAGE OF LENIN: TRADITIONS OF “MOCKERY” OR A NEW VIEW?
The author analyzed the image of Lenin in the works of contemporary artists Mayana Nasybullova (project “Lenin for the soul”), Ivan Tuzov (pixel art), and Sergey Vyskub (project “Lenin Trip”). By the beginning of perestroika, the deformation of the image of Lenin, picked up from a number of “senior conceptualists” (Komar and Melamid, L. Sokov, I. Kabakov, etc.), became a characteristic feature of the work of the group “Blue noses”, the Duo Sholokhov-Kuryokhin, artists V. Mamyshev-Monroe, A. Kosolapov, etc. At the same time, the ideological (even political) component of the image of Lenin was completely emasculated and replaced by an ironic/folklore component. In modern visual culture, the image of Lenin lives in different ways (advertising, memes, fakes, etc.), but the formative line remains dominant - the secret of success of a modern young artist lies in the right choice of medium (scotch art, pixel art, etc.). The revival of the leader's image for some artists of the post-perestroika generation does not still seem accidental. The image of Lenin in the 21<sup>st</sup> century has not been studied, which makes it possible to speak about the relevance of this topic. Research interests include both the theme of “leniniana”, which has already become a classic in art history (in its development in the 1990s-2000s), and a direct appeal to the work of young artists whose names are just beginning to appear in contemporary art. This report presents an attempt to see in the work of some of them (Mayana Nasybullova, Ivan Tuzov, the author of the project “Lenin trip”) something more than the external secondary conceptual images of the leader of previous years, namely: a new formation of interaction between the collective and their own past, which marks the image of Lenin. The author defined it as a concept of “post-perestroika nostalgic myth-making”.