Брачный сюжет как индикатор Русских концепций пространства
The Marriage Plot as an Indicator of the Russian Concepts of Space

Summary/Abstract: The article addresses marriage plots and their relations to the Russian concepts of space. It is based on the examples drawn from the Russian literature of the XIth–XXth centuries. In the folklore, the ritual of marriage supposes as the norm a heterogeneous structure of the space – the intersection of borders and exchange between my space and the space of the other. However, in the Russian culture the commitment to the concept of a unified space has been preferred. The tendency to unified space has penetrated the mythology of geopolitical space, as well as metaphysical and cosmological space, and also the personal space. In the Primary Chronicle (Povest Vremennykh Let), the folk norm has determined the formation of a national historical tradition of Kievan Rus’. However, the Muscovite Rus’ created the concept of a Rus as a single primordial Roman Empire, for which the principle of heterotopia was not necessary and even hostile. In modern Russian Literature, one of the most ardent followers of the idea of unity was Gogol. His first book Evenings in the Farm near Dikanka reproduces 6 variants of the marriage plot, and only one of them ends happily. In his aesthetic and historiosophical constructions, Gogol spoke of the need to see the humankind as one person, one unit, and the indivisible whole. However, this has become an obstacle for the implementation of marriage plot. The difficulty faced by Gogol has not been resolved by the subsequent literature either. The analysis of these and other examples of marriage plot in Russian culture is heading to the conclusion that the attempts to develop the concept of the unified space by omitting the concept of heterotopia inevitably leads to the distortion of the cultural norm.

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