The Petersburg text in the novel The Black Woman by Nikolay Grech. Article 1

Using the structural-semiotic method, on the material of Nikolay Grech's The Black Woman, the author considers the problem of the "Petersburg text" representation and art-semiotic organization through the correlation of official-ideological and romantic explications and the artistic-symbolic tradition of Freemasonry. Grech's novel The Black Woman (1834) is at the origins of the "Petersburg text" of the 19th century. Grech shows Petersburg as the center of statehood and holiness. The writer reduces the eschatologism constantly reflected in the "Petersburg text" and resulting from the collision of the city with natural elements. In the depiction of Petersburg life, he strives for the unity of scientific, culture triggering and secular and political interests. Grech uses the topoi of Petersburg connected with its periphery: the opposition "the city - the outskirts" expresses not so much social contrast as the possibility of distancing from the city and the creation of conditions for human equality to real space and space recreated in characters' speech, inserted stories and even flashbacks. The theme of Petersburg is represented on a wide geographical and historical scale. The writer relates different topoi based on the reflection of the higher principle in them. The sacral-symbolic overtones of the image of Petersburg are influenced by Grech's Masonic world view. This determines the ideology "peace is evil", opposite to the panegyric. The theatrical-visual color of Masonic rituals is reflected in many episodes of the novel, one of the main characters of which is the Italian Mason Alimari (whose name indicates the real Alimari, who worked in Petersburg). People's contacts, including international ones, like the Masonic unity of souls, conquering space and time, are added to the correlation of various topoi, whose me-ta-space is crowned by Petersburg. The plot of the Masonic novel is based on the allegory of Sophia as Wisdom, which the hero is looking for being blinded by the visible side of things and acquiring hidden knowledge. In connection with the city as a text, the archetype of the "virgin" is more important in a more archaic mythopoeic key. Following the Masonic tradition, Grech adds a symbolic-gnostic aspect to this. The main spiritual collision of the plot of the novel is that Alexei Kemsky sees the ghost of a "black woman" at critical moments of his life. This internally conforms to the main features of Petersburg as a "text" - its mirage and theatrical nature. The collision of the plot is connected with the intrigues of Kemsky's relatives, as a result of which he loses his wife Natasha and daughter Nadezhda, but eventually finds them in the finale (which is transparently connected with the Masonic version of the loss of Sophia the Wisdom and the search for her). Thus, in the novel the intrigue of the "metaphysical plot" (the story of the appearances of the "black woman") begins in Moscow, reflects as a mystery in Petersburg, then goes back from Petersburg to Moscow and is solved there. The trend of the development of the Petersburg theme is in the movement from the outer empiricality of space as a travesty (the first part of the novel) to its reading by the character as a text of the highest predestination, destiny (the third part). This is facilitated by the gnostic-symbolic foundations of the plot. Thus, Grech combines the strategy of the formal ideology of glorification of Petersburg as a historical and culturally progressive stronghold of national progress and the Masonic artistic and symbolic tradition that sets Baroque precedents of the novel poetics, which results in the ambiguous polysemantic artistic whole of the "Petersburg text" in the novel The Black Woman.

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