This article discusses the structure of the art space in modern literature, and also occupies an important place such a thing as «urban text», which has its own history of origin and development. Yu.M. Lotman was one of the first to talk about the Petersburg text, which, in accordance with the traditions of the semiotic school, was understood as the cultural space of the city as a whole, and not only as a collection of literary works.
Key words: the artistic space, topos, locus, local text, city text, the St.Peterburg text, the Tashkent text, hypertext, supertext, chronotope.
The literary work of Uzbekistan has always relied in its development on the best classical examples in the world literature. Creating an image of the city with its long history, cultural tradition, and specific literary roots is interesting from the point of view of visual possibilities when embodying general urban themes. For the humanitarian science of modern Uzbekistan, the formulation of this problem is a classic example of the close intertwining of the image of the city with the general cultural traditions of the time, reflected in the life of an ordinary person. This confirms the fact that in recent times in literary criticism and cultural studies experts have begun to discuss the issue related to the “Tashkent text”. In the general cultural and temporal aspect, the generally accepted “St. Petersburg” and discussed “Tashkent” text are different problems, but the general principle of the approach to the embodiment of the image of a city can reveal points of contact. The study of hypertext structures is one of the priorities of modern literary criticism. In the scientific sphere, a steady tendency has been formed to consider groups of works of art united according to some dominant feature as a single supertext: these are the already classic works of Yu.M. Lotman, V. N. Toporov in the St. Petersburg text of Russian literature and N. E. Mednis on the Venetian text [1]. Of great importance at the present time is the cultural concept of the text, considering the functioning of the text in the “culture — text” framework.
The uniqueness of the local text is determined by the specifics of the natural landscape, the available set of natural and cultural elements. On this basis, a special “ethnic” consciousness is formed — the local mentality. Fiction can find in local cultures not only unique themes and imagery (“local flavor”), but also convey — introduce into the global context — a special picture of the world, a perception of reality, characteristic only of the inhabitants of this locus. In this aspect, the study of the local text intersects with the subject of a special discipline, named by Yu.M. Lotman's “semiotics of culture”, which considers “the interaction of differently arranged semiotic systems, the internal unevenness of semiotic space, the need for cultural and semiotic polyglotism”, and a separate text as a cultural macrocosm that “becomes more significant than itself and acquires features of a cultural model” [2, p.129–132]. Within most national cultures, there are distinctive regional currents. This “multiplicity” and heterogeneity is explained by historical, political, ethnic, and cultural processes proper. Sustainable ideas about a geographical object, locality, landscape element, existing in public consciousness and recorded in works of art, are designated as the image of a place and become, in turn, an integral part of the cultural landscape. In literary studies, topos became the subject of discussion after the publication of the well-known work of E. Curtius [3], who first transferred the category “common place” from rhetoric to literary criticism and traced the fate of some common places in European literature. Topos — “solid cliches or patterns of thoughts and expressions that imprint formulas, phrases, phrases, quotations, stereotypical images, emblems, inherited motives. Topos falls from the writer's pen as a literary reminiscence. It has temporal and spatial omnipresence. In this extra-personal style element we touch upon such a stratum of historical life that lies deeper than the level of an individual invention” [4]. Curtius drew attention to the fact that topos is inherent in a formal nature and pointed out that this is a phenomenon of collective consciousness in literature. However, from the standpoint of the analysis of the artistic text, the topos was difficult to distinguish from the motive and the archetype with which it is usually identified even in dictionary definitions.
The concept of topos has also become a category of M. Bakhtin's aesthetics. According to this theory, the category of topos is one of the sides of an unbreakable space-time unity and, as a rule, serves as an instrument for the objectification of the meaning contained in a work of art. M. Bakhtin argues that the topos is the main spatial image of a literary text, a meaningful space, behind which, thanks to the accomplished events, «the poles, limits, coordinates of the world shine» [4]. M. M. Bakhtin introduced the term “chronotope”, which is now widely used in literary criticism, meaning “the essential interrelation of temporal and spatial relationships, artistically mastered in literature” [5, p.9–10]. The researcher notes: “In the literary and artistic chronotope there is a fusion of spatial and temporal signs in a meaningful and concrete whole. The time here is condensed, condensed, becomes artistic and visible; the space is intensified, drawn into the movement of time, plot, history. Signs of time are revealed in space, and space is comprehended and measured by time. An artistic chronotope is characterized by this intersection of the rows and the merging. ” Moreover, M. Bakhtin gave a fundamental role in his terminology to artistic time.
Topos plays a significant role in world literature and culture and in this sense serves to clarify the distinctive features of a particular style. Topos, as a rule, is not an element of the work: it belongs to the historical-literary reality from which the work arises, to the material from which the artist creates. The term “locus” is also used to denote units of the spatial structure of the text. Borrowing the locus written in Latin letters by S. Yu. Neklyudov, Yu. M. Lotman introduces this term into philology to denote the hero's firm confinement to the functional field of his action [6, p.423]. There is an opinion that a locus is a composite unit of a topos, denoting a specific place in a given continuum [7, p.87–94]. By analogy with Yu. M. Lotman's division of space into open and closed, the locus, as a rule, is called closed spatial images, and the topos is open. Sometimes the topos is assigned the role of designating the language of spatial relationships that permeate the artistic text, while the locus corresponds with a specific spatial image.
The structure of space includes a huge variety of spatial units. I. V. Rodnyanskaya emphasizes the fact that in literary and artistic (and more broadly — cultural) models of the world, the point of application of meaningful forces has long been such traditional spatial landmarks as “house” (the image of a closed space), “open space” (the image of open space).), «Threshold», «window», «door» (the border between the two), one way or another persisted in modern literature [9]. In the designated series, you must add a “road”, as an essential, multifunctional spatial reference widely used in art, not belonging to any of the named spaces. The significance of the chronotope of the road in literature is enormous: a rare work does without any variations in the motive of the road, and many are directly built on the chronotope of the road and the road meetings, since the chronotope of the road, having a large volume, reveals the space-time unity very clearly and clearly.
The image of any city that has its ancient history is imprinted in art by the originality and beauty of monumental forms. Due to certain ethnic, natural and architectural features, the city always has its own face, its vital energy, depending on the many different components of a particular historical period. The combination of all these elements into a single whole creates a tangible space of a real-visible image of the city according to the principle of a living organism — with its own character, attitude, religious affiliation, language and deep traditions. Fiction incorporates these features of character and creates a certain layer of speech that can verbally convey the exact characteristics of toponymic space and cause the reader a psychological sense of fidelity depicted. The city has its own language. He tells us with his streets, squares, waters, gardens, buildings, monuments, people, history, ideas and can be understood as a kind of heterogeneous text to which a certain general meaning is attributed and on the basis of which a certain system of signs can be reconstructed, realized in the text. Thus, the image of the place, the meaning of the place includes the visual and aesthetic characteristics of the place, its emotional impact, its symbolism and mythologization of the depicted space. Comprehension of space by culture is associated with the birth of multi-level geographic images — from the image of the world to the image of a place. The subjective heterogeneity of the world arises not only from its objective heterogeneity, but also due to the uneven understanding of its objects by the mentality of the national culture. The special position of the region, the city depends on many factors, and national peculiarities, passions and traditions play an important role.
References:
- Toporov V. N. Petersburg and “The Petersburg Text of Russian Literature” // Works on Sign Systems. — Tartu, 1984. Vol. 18; Mednis N. E. Venice in Russian literature. — Novosibirsk, 1999; Lotman Yu.M. Semiotics of culture and the concept of text // Lotman Yu.M. Selected articles. T. 1. Tallinn, 1992.
- Lotman Yu.M. Semiotics of culture and the concept of text // Lotman Yu.M. Selected articles. T. 1. — Tallinn: 1992. — pp. 129–132.
- Curtius E. Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter.// European literature and the Middle Ages — Bern. 1948. (Eng. 1953). (Electronic resource). — URL: https://ru.wiki2.org Curtius, _Ernst_Robert
- Makhov A. E. Topos. Literary encyclopedia of terms and concepts; by ed. A. N. Nikolyukina. — M., 2001.
- Bakhtin M. M. Epos and novel. — SPb.: 2000. — p. 9–10.
- Lotman Yu.M. About art. — SPb: Art-SPb, 1998. — p. 423.
- Prokofieva, V. Yu. The category of space in artistic refraction: loci and topoi // Vestn. Orenb. state un-that. — 2005. — № 11. — p. 87–94.
