‘Imagination of North’ in Author’s Landscape of V. L. Seroshevsky

Abstract

The author of the article refers to the comprehension of a personal biographical narrative, which reflects a person’s ideas about the geographical environment, that is, the phenomenon of “imagination of space”. The relevance of the study is explained by the fact that modern humanities develop and apply new methodological principles and approaches to identify mechanisms for adapting a person in fundamentally different, “foreign” conditions. The material of the study was the ego-documents, memoirs and fiction of V. L. Seroshevsky, a Polish political exile who spent 12 long years in Yakutia. The aim of the study is to identify the content basis of Vaclav Seroshevsky’s geopoetics, which consists in modeling and transforming the image of the North through the prism of “living and experiencing” space. The methodological principles of modern cross-cultural research, where human life is a narrative structure are applied in the article. As a result of historical-cognitive and linguo-culturological analysis, Seroshevsky’s autobiographical chronotope, consisting of three periods, broadcasting the formation, development and transformation of the geocultural image of the North, was analyzed for the first time. Three actual images-topoi (sea, forest, steppe valley) associated with the emotive-sensual factor that influenced the author’s landscape of Vaclav Seroshevsky were identified.

Keywords

• geopoetics
• biographical narrative
• imagination of the north
• geocultural images
• topoi
• spatial categories