Provincial Discourse of Russian Culture

The article presents the original research of the problems of Russian province as a socio-cultural and psychological phenomenon, artistic-figurative complex and philosophical metaphor. The Russian province was marked both by the author of this article and by a number of colleagues from other Russian regions as a specific spiritual phenomenon, devoid of direct geographical or socio-political coordinates and saturated with mentally determined features. The chronotope of the Russian province is revealed as a problem of interdisciplinary study. It is proved that the Russian province is not just an environment, landscape, image, place of action, it is the embodiment of the morphology of the Russian socio-geographical and cultural-historical space. The chronotope of Russian province is the embodiment of conflicting feelings and perceptions, according to which the uniqueness and belittlement, brightness and effacement paradoxically combined in one, widely spread and at the same time close space. It is necessary and urgent to reveal how the corpus of the components of the scientific metaphor “Russian province” revealed by the author of this article and colleagues-researchers at the Yaroslavl scientific school is manifested in the texts of culture, both artistic and scientific. In this corpus we have included and at the time justified it as the universally significant concepts of space, time, personality, text, symbol, and as specifically significant, first of all, chrono-tope, boredom and some others. The material component of the province -the city - is verified in synergetic, semiotic, hermeneutic aspects. The mental component is actualized through the motives of a bored person, a creative person and a marginal person. Relying on the opinions of philosophers (N. Berdyaev, V. Rozanov, V. Solovyov) and representatives of the artistic sphere (N. Nekrasov, A. Chekhov, I. Turgenev), the author concludes that the Russian province has acquired the quality of a complex artistic image and philosophical metaphor. This is a consequence of the fact that the Russian province is not homogeneous, it is multi-component, has different levels and different vectors of existence. By analogy with the well-known paradoxal phrase of V. Solovyov (“Russian European”), to the noun “province” inherently joins the adjective “Russian.” Thus, the Russian province in its conservatism and dynamism is an inexhaustible source of cultural meanings and a demanding object of interest.

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