Estate and Province in Russian Literature of the XX Century: Semiotics, Topic, Dynamics

Abstract

The article traces the dynamics of the topos of a town and a landowner's estate in F.M. Dostoevsky's “Demons” (1872), G.I. Chulkov's “Satan” (1914) and B.L. Pasternak's “Doctor Zhivago” (1945-1955). The concepts of “capital”, “province”, “estate” are revealed and their relationship in the topic of Russian literature for almost a century are shown. The study concluded that Dostoevsky in “Demons” conveyed the transitional state of the landowner's estate between the “capital” of the Golden Age of Russian culture (the end of the XVIII – first half of the XIX century) and the tendency to “provinciality” in the era of liberal reforms (1860-1870ies); “provinciality” of the estate of the Silver Age, its equalization with the nearby town  was most vividly embodied in the work of A.P. Chekhov and, after him, reflected in the “Satan” of the symbolist Chulkov, who also deprived the estate of spiritual-Christian potential; in Pasternak's work, the literary estate regained the high status of “metropolitan” and a leading role in the centuries-old Russian culture, not excluding the Soviet decades. The variability of the “estate topos” in “Doctor Zhivago” (Duplyanka and Varykino), the specifics of the Ural estate as an element of the “mining civilization”, the split of the image of Varykino into the embodied ideal of Russian classics of the XIX century, on the one hand, and the Soviet–era estate as a heterotopia and a place of high Christian creativity, on the other hand, are shown. The methodological guidelines of the study were phenomenological, structural-semiotic, conceptual, system-functional and geopoetic approaches.