Traditional and Modern Book Divination Practices in the Context of Literary Discourse

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of traditional and modern book divination practices in their significance perspective as philological research objects. The author believes that the study of such practices is relevant, since it opens up the possibility of consistent perception of the mechanisms of human interaction with the book in the perspective of this relationship’s growth, which determines the essence of culture and the meaning of human science. The field of inquiry includes all stages of book divination, from selecting a folio volume to interpreting the request results. The author supposes that selecting a book for divination appears to be an indicative decision characterizing the divination process as a game and a ritual that develops by the game reality laws and is often labeled as a magical act. Such divination rituals when described enables us to speak both about the modern bibliomancy continuity, as well as the methods of attracting readers and clients to fee based resources that predict the future and sell books. Particularly noteworthy are works specially created for divination, among which is the literary phenomenon of A. P. Sumarokov “Love divination book”. The author finds it important that the book divination practice is actively mastered by writers who use the idea of predicting the future in order to create an external composition of a literary work (M. Pavic). The motivic analysis and methods of cognitive linguistics, currently applied in descriptions of relevant cognitions and speech practices, are presented in the work as hidden algorithms for interpreting the results of such practices (solving the results of book divination is compared with the process of interpreting dreams). The author focuses on the importance of the modern reader and Internet user’s image, who is a follower of traditional (in some cases archaic) practices and at the same time belongs to the gadget era.