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RIGA AS A CONTEMPORARY LITERARY TEXT // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2018. Issue 3 (17). P. 155-169

The idea of Michel Butor, expressed in the essay “The City as a Text”, about the historical correlation of the architectonics of the city with the literary genre dominating in this period allowed the author of the article to read the contemporary Riga text from the genre perspective. The choice of two texts of the Riga group “Orbita” – the almanac “Orbita No. 3” (2001) and the multimedia project “Poetic Map of Riga” (2012–2014) – is motivated by the history of the creative group “Orbita” (Riga poets Sergey Timofeyev, Artūrs Punte, Semyon Khanin / Alexander Zapol, Vladimir Svetlov and Zhorzh Uallik are in its core), their special geo-poetics that turns the Riga locus into the genius loci, and, finally, by their myth-creation that allows to view their texts as the Riga Text. The special architectonics of the almanac “Orbita No. 3”, which is an editing table that assumes the existence of more than three thousand variants of combination of photographs and texts, offers the reader a fundamentally unfinished, unready, developing text. The authors of the almanac assign the same characteristics to a contemporary writer and a contemporary city – these are two correlating motifs in “Orbita No. 3”. Defining Riga only in comparison (to Moscow, St. Petersburg, New York, Shanghai, etc.), the authors of “Orbita” articulate the problem of self-identification. The inability to answer the question of “who am I” gives rise to the only possibility to read your city in the genre of a fragment that fits easily into another – Moscow, St. Petersburg, provincial – in any city text. An art-project “Poetic map of Riga” by “Orbita” was carried out from September 2012 to December 2014 and was timed to the election of Riga as the European Capital of Culture. The result of the creative efforts of the international team from Latvia (the curator of the project and the author of the concept is Artūrs Punte), Estonia, Lithuania, Sweden, Finland, Russia and Great Britain was the virtual map of Riga, which contained the city locuses, represented in poetry (both already created by the time of the project began, and created during its implementation). From the conceptual point of view, the created art object represents the city-Gesamtkunstwerk. The idea of the city as a total work of art has spread to all areas of project activity. It can be seen in the broadest coverage of the city topoi both in the project works and their presentations, as well as in the synthesis of the arts in a variety of genre forms – video and audio poetry, installations and performances, computer graphics and traditional painting, sculpture, music, dance, photography and graffiti. Moreover, in the synthesis of professional and non-professional art, the synthesis of emotionalaesthetic and rational-logical approaches, and in the collective multilingual author. Riga-Gesamtkunstwerk falls out of the present (including the social present): it is endowed with the characteristics of an ideal past and gets its realization only in an ideal, utopian future.

Keywords: city text, Riga text, myth, topos, locus, “Orbita”, genre, fragment, Gesamtkunstwerk, culture project, multimedia genres

“UBIVETS” (“MURDERER”) AS AN EXAMPLE OF THE POLYSEMIOTIC INTERPRETATION OF DOSTOEVSKY’S NOVEL “CRIME AND PUNISHMENT” // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2019. Issue 1 (19). P. 156-172

During the 20th century, the prose of F. M. Dostoevsky became more and more established as a “theatrical genre” on the Latvian stage. At the beginning of the century and during the years of the First Republic (1920–1940), Riga’s theatregoers were offered stage versions of almost all of Dostoevsky’s novels. This process was facilitated by the attentiveness of the Riga Russian Theater to the classical repertoire as a whole, as well as by the presence of a number of prominent Russian actors – Mikhail Chekhov, Gregory Khmara, Vasily Kachalov, etc – in Riga. At this time, the Riga theater of Russian drama made several productions based on original dramatizations of Riga directors Mikhail Muratov, Rudolf Ungern, Elena Roshina-Insarova. In the Soviet period, the search of theaters in Latvia focused on two polar tendencies – polyphonic or monologic Dostoevsky. The stage version of the novel “Crime and Punishment” was carried out in 1978 by a playwright and director Mark Rozovsky, a poet Yury Ryashentsev and a composer Eduard Artemiev. The play “Ubivets” (“Murderer”) is a polycode text, a deconstruction of the polyphonic nature of Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment”. According to the author’s genre definition at the time of writing, the play should be understood as a literary and musical performance (a musical). Applying the concept of M. M. Bakhtin for the composition of the play, Rozovsky deconstructs the novel into elements of the future polyphony. The word of Dostoevsky becomes two-voiced due to the combination of prose and poetry texts, to the linking of musical and literary languages, as well as through the synthesis of a high individual voice and the lower, penny dreadful, poly-voiced element of the crowd-choir. The visually stage text unfolds through the semantics of carnival, farce performance, town square performances, through the visualization of signs of culture of blessed fools and street aesthetics.

Keywords: F. M. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Mark Rozovsky, dramatization, M. Chekhov’s Riga Russian Theatre, Latvian theatre tradition, visual semiotics, polycode text