Features of the image of France in the Russian literature of late 18th - first half of 19th century: from the comic context to the serious one

Letters of a Russian Traveler by N. M. Karamzin signify the beginning of a new stage of the Russian-French dialogue when the comic literature context connected with the image of France changes into the neutral and serious one. One of the reasons for reaching this stage is changing of the type of aesthetic consciousness, which caused denial of the idea about reality as a hierarchy structure. As a result, there was no necessity in searching for the link (of comic nature) between two contrasting spheres of reality: real and ideal, low and high, which was crucial for the artistic perception of all phenomena including other cultures. Another reason for conversion from the comic context to the serious one was the high level of cultural fusion when focus on European lifestyle was habitual for the Russian nobility that led to reducing of laughter importance in solving international perception and communication problems. The analysis of the image of France makes us think that at this stage of Russian-French relations France (from the Russian point of view) becomes the anti-world incarnate. Anti-world, briefly, is a world of inverted meanings and values, world of the "entangled sign system". The key semantic cornerstones of the French culture are Russian cultural values turned inside out. For example, ''sacred'' is opposed to the overused "profane"; Romanticism and Realism literature efforts to understand the mysteries of people's inner world to reveal its complexity and ambivalence are opposed to the mask nature of the person's image in the French text; special relations between literature and reality when one's lifestyle and personality were built according to the already existing artistic model (kind of life-making) are opposed to the initially semiotic thus fictional nature of reality when life becomes its own simulacrum. And also the Russian of that time was shocked by the ''easy-going'' French attitude to their past which ''overthrew'', turned inside out Russians' precise evaluation of their own national path and history as ''The Other'' necessary for self-consciousness and gaining self-identity of either a single person or the whole culture. Comparing the individual elements of the "world" and the "anti-world", it must be remembered that the inverted reality is not a real image of Russia at that time but the ideal model of the sum of values of its culture. And despite the fact that "anti-world" is also primarily a mental construct in the case of France its actual shape is so close to that construct that interpenetration and elements of unity take place. That leads to the priority and domination of the set model over the reality and its perception.

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