The Solovki text (Part 1)

This paper is an attempt to describe the "Solovki text" of Russian literature. Its first part raises the question of the symbolic continuity of the topos with a changing historical destiny and, accordingly, with a radical semantic conversion from the monastery to the Gulag. It also focuses on systematising the material and reviewing its evolution from ancient history to the middle of the 20th century. The liminal topos of the Solovetsky Islands and the centers of Russian culture and political power had continuous, though various relations. Basing on this, it is possible to designate the semiotics of the spiritual, cultural and political potential of Solovki as a local text as "the centre on the edge." The fates of key figures in Russian history were connected with the Solovki for centuries. Since the sixteenth century, Solovki have always been a stronghold of alienation and dissent. At times, the islands were the focus of a fierce confrontation with the central political power. They always were the outpost of imperial expansion and defense, and later an experimental model of Russia's new political system. The following evolution stages can be singled in the "Solovki text": 1. Colonial texts. The first hagiographies and chronicles of the 16th century realise the strategy of the topos development through its Christianisation and sanctification in the corresponding narrative of symbolic and actual colonisation and civilisation. 2. Provincial text, or the text of internal colonization. The second stage of the Solovky text evolution occurs in the late 19th century (after the British attack during the Crimean War) and in the early 20th century, with the gradual closing of the Solovki prisons, which used to be main places of political exile and imprisonment (1903) for centuries. It was also the time when the monastic economy flourished, and the monastery experienced a massive influx of pilgrims and tourists, including numerous artists and writers (S. Maksimov, V. Nemirovich-Danchenko, M. Prishvin). 3. The Soviet era created the "Solovki text" as a kind of metonymy, or synecdoche, in two versions simultaneously: both in the works of Soviet ideologists, primarily M. Gorky ("In the Soviet Union" and in the propaganda film "Solovki" (both in 1927)), and in the memoirs of the Solovki Prison Camp inmates, the camp was presented as a model of society as a whole, thus acting as a pars pro toto of the entire Soviet Union. 4. "The Gulag Archipelago" is the starting intertextual point for the later Soviet and Post-Soviet version of the Solovky text, which can be called the experience of national historical typification. This definition implies a view of the Solovki history as the stages of the formation of a self-identical topos with a huge symbolic potential for all Russia.

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