| The dissertation is focused upon Russian literary salons of the first four decades of the 19th century. This phenomenon of Russian cultural life is located at the crossroads of several scholarly disciplines, and consequently the approach used in this research is the semiotics of culture as developed by the Tartu School and its Western counterparts. The diachronic and synchronic analysis of more than thirty literary salons has allowed the determination of their structure-forming principles, and particularly, a theatrical principle, as well as interrelationship between salons and major aesthetic trends of the time, such as Pre-Romanticism, Romanticism and Late Romanticism. It is the thesis of this dissertation that literary salons constituted the main mechanism for generating the literary process of the period. First, a salon functioned as a place in which public opinion concerning the literary process was created. Second, certain literary genres were formed in the salons; new trends took shape, and new aesthetic ideas were embodied in special prosaic and poetic forms. Many masterpieces of Russian literature were both produced and recorded in the pages of albums (the phenomenon of a literary album as the metatext of a salon is also addressed). Third, literary salons occasioned the creation of actual literary works by promoting types, prototypes, plots, topics, etc. The general orientation of a salon toward a literary type of behavior and theatricalized manner of self-representation was aimed at a spectator-outsider. All of these features make the literary salon a type of secondary modeling system which recycles the raw material of life into semi-artistic forms, and thus enables the subject matter of the salon's life to enter literature and the arts. |
