Рetty-bourgeois estate: experience of semiotic analysis

Abstract

The article analyzes the language of petty-bourgeois appeals to power as a semiotic problem. The cultural-semiotic approach to the problem of philistine linguistic picture of the world involves an appeal to the inner point of view of the philistines themselves. In order to analyze the picture of the world of a philistine reflected in his letter to the authorities, it is necessary to take into account many factors related to the level of education of the urban philistine environment, the upbringing adopted in philistine families, the reading circle, the possibility of obtaining information about the so-called high culture, to which representatives of the upper class had access. In this regard, another semiotic factor plays a significant role: fashion. Fashion is like a stone thrown into water. Someone is creating a fashion sign. And it is picked up and spread in society. Romanticism, as a historical and artistic style, influenced not only the texts of behavior of the highest Russian privileged class. The nobles were not in an isolated position from the rest of society. Their life also took place in Russian cities. The emotionality of the romantic era gradually, like circles on the water, became fashionable for the townspeople. Their cruel romance, becoming a kind of text of behavior, gradually covered the epistolary culture, traces of which are very difficult to detect in the sources of personal origin traditional for the historian, but can be caught in appeals to the authorities. The article analyzes the culture of these appeals, gestures of politeness, a certain strain and attempts to erase hierarchical boundaries. The author comes to the conclusion about the semiosphere of the city, which was in the general binary opposition of the Russian culture of the XIX century: between good and evil, between power and society.