The human as a subject of discussion: Wissarion Belinsky and Nikolay Gogol. About two models of literary encoding of reality

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to conduct a comparative analysis of two culture codes, semantic  and  asemantico-asyntactic,  as  tools  for  ordering  reality  and  discovering  the  meaning  of events. Belinsky and Gogol’s lives and their mutual relations are the subject of our research. The antinomy, and even irreconcilability of codes is observed in concepts of the human and the world. According to the semantic code which was used by Gogol, a person is a part and, at the same time, a reflection of God’s order, and  the world is dichotomic (sacral – sinful, meaningful – meaningless, spiritual – material); it is an area for the fight between good and evil. Belinski, in turn, following the asemantico-asyntactic code, put the human at the centre of the rational world. At the beginning of the 40’s, when Belinsky could still interpret Gogol’s  writings  within  the  frameworks  of  asyntactico-asemantic  culture  code,  he  regarded himself as similar to Gogol. The split occurred after the book Chosen pieces of a correspondence  with  friends  was  published.  The  tragedy  of  not  being understood, which  both  great Russian thinkers faced, was evidence for the existence of two separate sign and  meaning systems within one culture. It must be added that the systems developed against the background of state order, which was coded by the syntactic culture code. Further research needs to be conducted in this field.