A flying mousetrap: an essay on the fixation of the Vienna text of Russian Literature

The research is supported by RHSF grants no. 15-03-00581 "The development of representations of space in cultural practices: past and present" and no. 15-33-14106 "Targets of the state national policy: the renewal of human resources and national cultures (the problem of The Other)". After a linguistic and communicative turn came a cultural turn in the conceptualization of the text, during which it became clear that due to its ability to be structured in a set of values culture has a structure similar to the structure of the text. Peter challenged Russia, and it responded to him with the phenomenon of Pushkin (A. Herzen). V.N. Toporov with his concept of the Petersburg text threw a methodological challenge to modern Russia, and it replied with a textual revolution in the Humanities. A call was declared to the exclusivity of this concept, its "intolerance" to other spaces. The answer was in the triumph of the revolution in "an active, deformable space" with the "local ethics" expressed in the widespread and purposeful and spontaneous establishment of a variety of local "cultural texts" of different level and scale: following the Petersburg text came that of Moscow, Kiev, Siberia, Altai, Ural, Volga, Saratov, Samara, Caucasus, Vyatka, Yelets, Murom, North, and then of Paris, London, Berlin. As a rule, all the material accumulated here is not a superficial imitation, as it may seem at first glance, but the answer of the Russian environment, with all its features and all the pre-existing complex humanitarian knowledge to the underlying needs of the national semiosis. At the same time, the establishment of local culture texts often finds, using E. Husserl's expression of fundamental methodological naivety which differs from ordinary naivety, what the "naivety of a higher rank" is (which, in particular, manifests itself in mixing thematic and textual aspects in the process of problemati-zation of the subject of the study). The major communication rhythm in the formation of the local text is subordinate to the scheme "Call-and-Response" not only between civilizations, but within the civilized mechanism. If in St. Petersburg at the call of Peter I Russian literature answered with the phenomenon of Pushkin, in Vienna the role of the defendant in such a challenge belonged to Gogol, whose stay in Vienna was quite dramatic, ending in the so-called "Viennese crisis". The Petersburg text came to Vienna in the bronze horseman, and in the image of the Nose. The article shows how Vienna had an indirect influence on Russian literature in the nineteenth century through the Biedermeier style, and in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries via Vienna actionism.

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