Russian Rave-Culture of the 1990-s and Early 2000-s in the Musical Media: Case of the "Ptyuch" magazine

This research aims to study the relations between the Russian rave culture and its’ media representation in the Ptюch magazine. It consists of three chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. The first chapter studies the cultural functions, which characterise the niche-media similar to Ptюch. Author uses theories of subcultural media and amplifies it with the methodological instruments of cultural studies and other theoretical programs, while also utilising different versions of the media discourse analysis to study the cultural and political potential of the media. The second chapter is dedicated to analysis of the first issue of the Ptюch magazine and the sociocultural context, which preceded its’ creation and defined its’ ideological core. The sources are studied on the basis of the critical discourse analysis, which suggests to analyse the communicative event as sociocultural practice, discursive practices of production and consumption and text. The text will be analysed by describing the ways of recontextualisation and reconceptualisation of the social practice, explaining the ways in which the identities of the author and the reader are constructed and pointing on the relationship between them. In the third chapter the same methodology will be used to analyse the issues of the Ptюch magazine from 1995 to 1998 and the sociocultural and discursive practices before and after that period. The author’s analysis shows, that the ideology of the magazine and the culture around it was based on the principles of the free aesthetic expression and the social autonomy, which were adapting to the addressee of the message. However those principles proved to be insolvent in the situation of the financial and the cultural crisis, which took place in 1998.