Slavic cosmogonic myth in Vladimir Vernadsky's picture of the world and idiostyle

The article considers the mythological and scientific picture of the world in the old Slavic cosmogonic discourse and in the creative discourse of Vladimir Vernadsky, the founder of the doctrine of the noosphere. The author analyses concepts-mythologems, which constitute the “core” of cosmogonic representations in both cases, and their lexemes-nominates in Slavic myths and Vernadsky's scientific, autobiographical, and epistolary texts. The analysis involves the linguistic and conceptual meanings of the lexical units “myth”, “cosmogony”, “human”, “universe”, “life” and their associative-derivative correlates as nominees of authentic and author's reinterpreted ideas about “creation of the world”,“evolution of all living things” The analysis has shown that though the classical Slavic myth in the scientific discourse retains separate mythologemes as part of the cosmogonic narrative (cosmic scale, the power of the mind as an active principle, the interaction of nature and human, aspiration to the future), it goes through a substantial and methodological rethinking. An authentic myth is interpreted by Vernadsky with reference to both external circumstances (a special historical mission of natural sciences in explaining evolutionary and historical patterns), and the specificity of Vernadsky's own understanding of the universe structure and development (an intuitive-rationalistic way of knowing, faith in the triumph of human reason, scientific labour). The analysis contributes to the study of the general Slavic picture of the world and Vernadsky's personal concept sphere related to the cosmogonic ideas, as well as to undersyanding the mechanisms of discursive conditioning of concept formation and diachronic interaction of different discourses.

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