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MOSCOW AS A TEXT IN THE WORKS BY SERGEI N. DURYLIN: AUDIO AND VISUAL ASPECTS // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2020. Issue 3 (25). P. 72-86

The article analyzes the problems of the poetic style of the “Moscow text” in the works of Sergei N. Durylin (1887–1954) based on the notes V Rodnom Uglu [Hometown. The Life of Old Moscow] (1928–1939) written in the Tomsk exile and the poem from the “Moscow cycle” “A. R. Artyom” (1926), which is being published for the first time. Aside from the traditional approach used by literary scholars, which proposes to consider urban space as a text, the article uses a multidisciplinary visual-anthropological approach, which considers a city as a visual-communicative text and a cultural-communicative environment. This is relevant due to both a new surge of interest in urban issues and due to the peculiarities of the poetic style of the writer’s works. It is the audiovisual code that makes it possible to most adequately consider the “urban space” in Durylin’s mentioned works as the most representative for considering this topic. Durylin’s poem “A. R. Artem” serves as the micro-model of the “Moscow text”. It contains the main audiovisual semiotic “signs” of “urban space” (the image of silence, on the background of which the “sounding world” of the Moscow house and its inhabitants are depicted: Alexander R. Artyom, Anton P. Chekhov, the cat). This emphasizes the importance of the anthropological aspect in the formation of the “Moscow text” model because characters, not cultural objects or loci, are bearers of the “Moscow spirit”. In the course of the analysis, an attempt was made to determine the place of the notes V Rodnom Uglu, which had not been previously analyzed by literary scholars, in the literary process of the era. Along with other Moscow texts, a novel about Moscow by Andrei Bely, poems by Marina I. Tsvetaeva, Happy Moscow by Andrei Platonov, “Moscow” works by Mikhail A. Bulgakov and Ivan S. Shmelyov, Durylin is trying to create his own invariant of the “Moscow myth”. Diverging from the construction of the traditional plot, Durylin creates and depicts the images of the capital (quiet, golden-domed, Great Russian) which acquired an almost mythological status for the writer, expressed Moscow’s unique and timeless face, which is almost always of national significance for the writer, and, one must think, showed the reader a certain perspective on reading the notes that make up the core of Durylin’s “Moscow text”. The writer identifies three important concepts that represent Moscow’s face: the soul of Moscow, the third Rome, dissolved in the historical post-revolutionary second Babylon, became the invisible Moscow-Kitezh, a city that should rise again. It is also important that Durylin presents his supertext about the city primarily as a “human way of being in existence” and, therefore, about space as a cultural dimension of being. Along with this, he presents the sacred archetype of sobornost as culture-forming. Trying to create an objective picture, the author pays attention to the testimonies of foreigners Herbert Wells, Émile Verhaeren, and others.

Keywords: “Moscow text”, audio-visual code, multidisciplinary, Durylin, sobornost, archetype