Гуманитарный вектор (Dec 2023)
Russian Cultural Landscape in the Book of Donbass Military Poetry “The Great Checkpoint” (2023)
Abstract
The paper focuses on the representation of Russian cultural geography in the poetry collection “The Great Checkpoint” by the method of thematic modeling, which combines poems by poets from different regions dedicated to the war in Donbass 2014–2022. Thematic modeling presents a topic as a set of keywords expressing it. The topic of Russia as a geographical reality was chosen for the study. The names of geographical objects have been selected as keywords, which according to the theory of cultural landscape, represent a text as a system of signs referring to the meanings of culture. The landscape acts as a textual message of culture to itself, overcoming gaps and preserving images in cultural memory. The principle of the collection formation is chronological. Each year of the war is represented by a special section, and the poems of the same poets can be included in different sections. The whole book acts as a single collection of texts, which was searched. An analysis of the occurrence of geographical names in the collection of texts shows that the book reveals the topic of the borders of Russia, presents many topographical objects of its European part, with one exception Siberia is not involved, two seas – the Black and the Baltic ‒ are widely reflected, Moscow is very little represented as opposed to the frequently appearing St. Petersburg. Russia is represented in the semantic space as the Third Rome, the Country of the Soviets and the Empire. Ukraine and Donbass have not been analyzed separately, but it can be indicated beforehand that such topos as Odessa and Kiev stand out on the territory of Ukraine, and in Kiev – Maidan and Babi Yar, as symbols of the current military confrontation; from the Donbass cities, the book presents cities such as Donetsk, Lugansk, Mariupol, Lisichansk. The perspectives of the future research are outlined in the conclusion: religion in the collection, Russian culture and literature in the book, as well as foreign cultural geography.
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