2023 Vol. 14 №1

The article explores the images of the German cities, Lubeck and Hamburg, presented in Nikolay Gretsch’s travelogue “The real trip to Germany in 1835”. The author determines the link between the images of the two cities and the tradition of describing Germany as an idyllic place. This tradition was widespread in Russian literature at the end of the 18th century — first half of the 19th century. In Gretsch’s text, Lubeck and Hamburg are depicted as idyllic but to different degrees. The locus of Lubeck is a homogeneous, patriarchal and achronous idyll, a static space that seems to have frozen in the Middle Ages. In contrast to Lübeck, the city of Hamburg is depicted as a large, contemporary, and dynamic city — in other words, as a modern type of idyll. Moreover, its orderliness goes beyond the idyll and is defined by the rational organisation of space, which is characterised by heterogeneity. Firstly, the idyllic subloci are distinguished, where the key role belongs to the demi-natural images of the garden, the park and the promenade. Secondly, the utilitarian-rational subloci of the stock exchange, quay, and canals are described. Subloci, which are marked by both idyll and rationality, have been identified (e. g. an orphanage, an almshouse). Finally, the third spatial type identified marginal sublocations of seafarers’ establishments associated with the motives of disorderli­ness — drunkenness, debauchery, etc.

The article is devoted to reflecting the image of a city in verbal data — topographic names. The author bases the research upon the ideas of the cultural-semiotic approach to city studies, upon the conception of a city as a text and palimpsest and sets the goal of investigat­ing semantic changes in the toponymic text of Ekaterinburg examined in its historical dynam­ics. The main stages of modification of the Ural city toponymic image are characterized via the metaconcept of chronotopos. As a tool of linguocultural analysis per se, generalised onomasio­logical, semantic models, or cultural semantic codes, are used. These involve landscape-distinctive, social-functional and social-symbolic codes. The paper defines the specificity of the realisation of cultural semantic codes in the toponymy (urbanonymy) of Ekaterinburg relative to three chronotopic junctures determined by the city renaming landmark acts — Ekaterin­burg, Sverdlovsk, Ekaterinburg. Topical meanings are revealed in the toponymic portrait of the city in different periods of its life. The changes that increase in the toponymy in the framework of one chronotopic juncture and contribute to the transference of a part of cultural experience to the next historic period are traced. In the image of Ekaterinburg represented in its toponymic text, traits of the city’s territorial identity underpinned by its natural and geo­graphical, economic and social factors are indicated.

The article aims to reveal the principles of urban space organisation in Viktor Marti­novich’s novel “Mova”. Due to the fact that the novel is based on a linguistic problem (the author defines the genre of the novel as a “linguistic thriller”), the representation of the city in the novel is subject to linguistic models and principles. The main of these principles is the isomorphism of the part and the whole. The structural generality of the different levels of the novel and the novel space is based on the technique of inversion. There is a movement of value poles within the system of oppositions, at the level of narrative, plot and space (the aggressor — the victim, the East — the West, the centre — the periphery, one’s own — someone else’s). The generally accepted structure of the zones of the centre and the periphery is changing: the periphery is associated with order and norm, and the centre — with the concepts of chaos, disor­ganization, and deviation. The opposition of one’s own and someone else’s (language, space) comes to the fore, which corresponds to the socio-cultural context of Belarusian litera­ture. The centre and the periphery are structured according to different cultural models: the centre is or­ganized according to the dual model, and the periphery according to the ternary one.

The article is devoted to extralinguistic factors that contribute to the renaming of cities in one of the North Caucasian regions of Russia. The study of toponymy, in particular, the oikonyms of a certain territory, is of great importance for the study of the history, ethnogra­phy, and culture of the people living in this territory. The purpose of this work is to identify the original names of settlements and study new names of cities, which will contribute to a more fruitful study of socio-historical processes and lexical-semantic transformations in the language of the inhabitants of these settlements. This is especially true for studying the histo­ry of such new-written languages ​​as the Adyghe (Circassian) languages, in the absence of written monuments (Adygs — endonym, Circassians — exonym). The results of the study have led to the conclusion that cities in the Karachay-Cherkess Republic are the least protected from renaming for ideological and political reasons, rather than rural settlements.