The Petersburg textin the novel The Black Woman by Nikolay Grech. Article 2

In the article, using the structural-semiotic method on the material of Nikolay Grech's The Black Woman, the problem of the representation and the artistic semiotic organization of the Petersburg text is considered. For this text, the archetypes of the "tsar" and "virgin", which have a universal mythopoeic and plot-phenomenological content, are important. Petersburg is built up as a map of life and destiny of the "I"; it includes the eternally lasting peace-giving act of the cultural hero - Tsar Peter I - the "genius" of the place. It is important that Petersburg is a philosophical and symbolic topos accentuating the relations of a person with history, the temporal whole of life through the topic of dialogue with destiny actualized through the phenomenon of the "black woman". Petersburg influences these relations as a "text", as a figurative complex, part of a philosophical plot through its own symbolic metonymies rather than as an image of space. Throughout the novel, Petersburg is strengthened as a semantic center - imperial, historical, symbolic in a masonic way, the center of intersection of the horizontal and the vertical. It is the center of human identity through the unity of spirit and time, life and history. However, with the "strengthening", the possibility of alienation as the wrong side of the "ideal" opens up. In response to this, the ability of the reader to read the spatial text or images of the ek-phrastic type is enhanced in the person as an expression of a higher personalistic knowledge. Petersburg takes away from the character what tied him to life. It is Petersburg in its influence on the life of the character that leaves the question of teleologicality open. And therefore this question is solved through the relations of the "I" with its earthly deputies, "metonymies", which turn out to be in intricate Baroque-style relations (symbolic, mythopoeic equivalents of the higher principle). The metropolitan landscape fits into the biography of the protagonist, who returned to Petersburg after many years: different plans of the past are united and "reread" by the protagonist through the text of space. The subject-functional load of the Petersburg text is increasing: in the narrative the specific weight of Petersburg realities and their plot-functional significance are increasing. Thus, the consideration of the Petersburg text in The Black Woman by Grech results in the following. On the one hand, the theme of Petersburg is connected with the expression of a panegyrical tradition, combined with the Masonic-Gnostic symbolism; it is an ideologically (rhetorically) asserted utopia of the unity of the scale of the life of man and of state (imperial) service as an earthly historical-state path and a "heavenly" law. On the other hand, Petersburg is a space alienated from man, whose "mechanics" unfolds as a Baroque "disgrace", which absorbs man (poor Job) as a spectator. This is an expression of the forces (historical, social, cultural), which determine the position of man and his fate from outside. Petersburg thus expresses the "openness" of man before the penetration of any forces into his destiny, which leads to a dramatic alienation. In this nebulous unreliable world of Vanitas, human love and memory act as a counterweight. The final leave or displacement from Petersburg is opposed by the humanistic unity of people who have regained each other (i.e., have overcome total orphanhood). Petersburg dominates in the novel, and only in the last chapters the characters, becoming free, leave it.

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