Life and death of the "Siberian Athens": the problem of the life circle of the metaphorical toponym in the discourses of the 20th - early 21st centuries

The paper addresses the refinement of the metaphorical genesis of the toponym "Tomsk - Siberian Athens" and the research of its socio-historical functioning in diverse discourses of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. The purpose of the paper is to research the living cycle of this metaphoric toponym in its conjunction with the main historical, esthetic, social and political processes of the time. In the paper patterns in the functioning of the toponym, such as phases of its development in artistic, journalistic, epistolary discourses are exposed, characterizing its actual state and making prognoses of its future destiny. At the beginning of the 20th century the university semantics was at the core of the myth-concept. The opening of the university became a sign of enlightenment and a real material and cultural environment in which the people of Tomsk sought to surpass the projects and social practices common at the time not only in Siberia, but in all Russia. The Modern Times of world creation of the 1920s-1930s demanded new meanings. In I. Ehren-burg's novel Den' vtoroy [Day Two], Tomsk is a factory of scientific education for the masses, necessary because of its role in the industrial transformation of the USSR. In the same period the image of Tomsk as the Siberian Athens in the memoirs of L. Martinov and the correspondence of the playwright N. Erdman, is contradictory, it does not meet the reality, where the University exists as a temple of science, apart from the city itself, which shows the beginning of the stratification of the meaning of the toponym. The semantic of "manpower forge" persists well into the 1950s, accompanied by the idea of a historical succession, and the attempt to rename Tomsk into the "Siberian Oxford" fails. In the 1960s, the thaw aesthetics of man-trust (R. Rozhdestvensky, "Exams in Tomsk") adds a new concept of Tomsk as a human capital to its educational level. Tomsk starts to be perceived as a student's city, the city of youth. In the 1970s-1980s no new meaning are created, and in the 1990s the toponym disappears from the prose and poetry of Tomsk poets (V. Antukh, V. Brusianin, E. Klimenko, V. Kurkov, A. Olear, A. Panov, A. Redchitz, V. Serdiuk, G. Skarlygin), who perceive and depict the city as a part of their personal spiritual and emotional biography that has nothing to do with Athens. In the poetic and prosaic discourse of the 1990s-2000s (Yu. Shcheglov) the myth-concept is completely destroyed, its use becomes the lot of "second" and "third" class discourses: internet-discourse and marginal newspaper genres. The toponym still exists as a cliche in a range of official documents among Tomsk functionaries. As such the life circle of the metaphorical toponym "Tomsk - Siberian Athens" has a varied time spread in different discourses, and a varied meaning potential. If in both the epistolary (personal correspondence) and the artistic (poetry and prose) discourses it loses its symbolic potential and becomes a cliche in the early 1960s, in the journalistic discourse it retains its symbolic status up to the beginning of the 1990s. In the 2000s it transfers from artistic to marginal genres (congratulations, speeches, in-scripts) and the internet shows that it has definitely used up its symbolic capital and has definitely become a cliche. Such a process is caused by the changing historical, social (cultural and educational), informational and technological realities and the new challenges that they bring.

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