Russian geographical drawing as a semiological system
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2025-3-33-66
The term "Russian geographical drawing" (russkii geograficheskii chertiozh), which was proposed by Vladimir Kusov in 1993, has no exact equivalent in English. The term closest in meaning would probably be English "estate maps", or French plans terriers, or German Flurpläne. The term describes large-scale, usually manuscript, maps resulting from surveying and measuring rural lands and usually used as an evidence relating to disputes about ownership. They usually cover two to five rural settlements. Some of them are painted, but most of them are uncolored ink drawings. The material for the study was the content of publicly-accessible web-GIS "Drawings of the Russian State from the 16th to 17th Centuries" developed by the Historical Geoinformatics Laboratory (at the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences) in 2017. Unlike their European counterparts, Russian geographical drawings were a superstructure over a more archaic Russian geographical system known as "The Book of the Great Chart" (Kniga Bol'shomu chertezhu). This gives grounds to assume that there was a certain interaction between the signs of the Russian geographical drawings and the signs of "The Book of the Great Chart". The article provides a semiological analysis of Russian geographical drawings using methods outlined by Roland Barthes in his work Elements of Semiology. In accordance with Barthes' methodological recommendations, I selected a corpus of graphic materials – a set of drawings covering an area ranging from 10 to 30 kilometers in length and/or in width. Then I extended the terms language and speech upon the case of cartography and established a dialectical connection between them. In cartography, the cartographer's speech (to the extent that his individual choice of signs is arbitrary) creates the language of maps, which is subsequently individually read by their users. I then described the features of the graphic symbols used in Russian geographical drawings. In particular, I identified and explained their high level of motivation. Then I distributed the facts discovered in the system of Russian geographical drawings along two axes (or planes) of language – paradigmatic (metaphorical) and syntagmatic (metonymic), in accordance with Roman Jakobson's concept. As examples, I considered such cartographic syntagmas as route and border. In the course of this, I identified a transformational model of the sign tree, the signified of which could enter into various relationships with other graphic elements of the drawing, changing the form of the content depending on the type of these relationships: whether the sign tree was considered as a boundary sign, or as an element of the forest. It is the existence of such a model that probably explains both the abundant presence of trees in the drawings and the unusualness of their graphic forms. In addition, I discovered a semantic link between the system of Russian geographical drawings and "The Book of the Great Chart". One of the main conclusions of the work is that it is impossible to formulate an essentially correct characterization of the Russian geographical drawing without taking into account the "The Book of the Great Chart". Together they formed a more complex system in which "The Book of the Great Chart", which was part of the basic educational qualifications of the government officials, played the role of a "coordinate grid", and the Russian geographical drawing revealed the details of the displayed natural and economic situation.
Keywords: Russian geographical drawing, Book of the Great Chart, mapping system, cartographic sign, arbitrary and motivated in sign, representation of routs, representation of boundaries
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Issue: 3, 2025
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