“Almaty” text in the works of Bakhytzhan Kanapyanov

Urban studies in literary criticism have been developing since the end of the twentieth century in the direction developed in the works of Yuri Lotman, Vladimir Toporov, and others. The city is considered as a super-textual semiotic phenomenon, consisting of several subsystems: the city as a name, the city as space and the city as time. The city has its own “language” and has the ability to generate certain meanings and images. In the works of individual writers, a certain image of the city is modeled, which becomes part of the idea of a particular city existing in culture and literature. Researchers studied the “Almaty” text in the works of Dina Rubina, Yuriy Dombrovsky. In this work, I discuss the “Almaty” text created in works by the Kazakh Russianspeaking poet Bakhytzhan Kanapyanov; this text implicitly includes transcultural meanings. The toponym Almaty has great cultural significance and generates a mythopoetic halo around the name of the city. Based on the semantics of the word alma (literally ‘apple’), historical facts, and with the help of allusions, the poet creates a mythopoetics of the city. It includes myths and legends about the apple of knowledge, about halves of an apple as people, about Newton’s apple, about Almaty as the ancestral home of apples and the birthplace of the Aport apple. The author complements the mythopoetic aura of the “Almaty” text with the idea of the apple as the ancestor of humanity. The urban space of Almaty is formed by several semiotically significant loci of the eastern city from Kanapyanov’s point of view: ditches, Green Bazaar, blue spruces, Medeo. In the poet’s depiction, Almaty is a multi-confessional, multicultural city, so sacred Muslim and Christian symbols (crosses and mazars) coexist here. Since Almaty is surrounded by mountains, the city and the mountains form a single topos. The mountains are the outer boundary of the city. Despite the city’s inclusion in the mountainous landscape, the mountains pose a constant threat to its existence - avalanches can destroy it. The poet talks about the eternal struggle between the natural elements and man. Kanapyanov’ s “Almaty” text is realized in the oppositions “city - steppe”, “city - village”, “closed topos - open space”, “natural - artificial”, conveying the transcultural specificity of his artistic worldview. The rhythm of the city as time is determined by the time of day and the seasons. The poet’s favorite time of day is night; for him Almaty is “the city of green nights”. Thus, in his presentation of the city as a semiotic cultural and natural phenomenon, Kanapyanov conveys certain ideas and meanings to the reader, and the urban text in his poetic works acquires a special aesthetic function. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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