Artistic geography of "Middle Volga texts" by D. Osokin

Abstract

This article is devoted to the representation of the Middle Volga space in the works of the Russian prose writer Denis Osokin. Domestic literary scholars propose to consider artistic space from the point of view of spatial topography, which implies the opposition of abstraction to concreteness, its horizontal or vertical orientation, spatial extent and localization (expansion-compression, openness-closedness). The search for new methods for studying literary texts has given rise to the need for a comprehensive method, in which a method combining cultural-historical, mythopoetic and geopoetic analysis is quite promising. The subject of the research is the artistic space of Osokin’s “Volga region” texts. The purpose of the study is to determine the specifics of the literary geography of Osokin’s works related to the Volga region. The work uses such scientific methods of analysis as cultural-geographical, structural-semiotic methods and contextual analysis. The scientific novelty of the research is determined by the fact that among modern literary works there are no works devoted to the study of the artistic space of the works of many modern authors, in particular Denis Osokin, his works are considered insufficiently in relation to the phenomena of Kazan and other regional texts. The main conclusion of the study is the substantiation of the special properties of the artistic space of the Middle Volga in the works of D. Osokin, which has attractive properties - uniqueness, semantic richness, cognitive value. Reflection of geographical space in works of art makes it possible to represent and interpret the sociocultural processes of a place and set ontological guidelines. Osokin’s Middle Volga region is a metaspace where the national is organically combined with the foreign, it is a space of memory and the rediscovery of lost meanings.