ISSN: 1550-7521
ISSN: 1550-7521
Abasheva MP* and Brazgovskaya EE
Perm State Humanitarian Pedagogical University, Russia
Received date: November 30, 2015; Accepted date: February 12 , 2016; Published date: February 24, 2016
Citation: Abasheva MP, Brazgovskaya EE. Garden as Identification Space (In the Polish and Russian Literature of the 1980-ies). Global Media Journal. 2016, S1: 8.
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The paper is concentrated on the cognitive-artistic potential of garden as a spatial model, able to represent not only the universal but also national and individual world images. The data for study were the texts of the Russian and Polish literature written at the end of the 20-th century. In all the texts, garden is the title, the genre, the compositional principle and the character. All the authors are using the circle of symbolic meanings associated with garden as a spatial locus, a cultural text and cultural memory. It’s been known that in the Slavic literature of the 20- th century there are various ways of using the model: garden as a memory map (Iwaszkiewicz and the individual’s self-identification) or as a map of intellectual space (MiÃâ¦Ãâosz and self-identification with culture), garden as the historical space of a country (Korolyov and national identification). The type of identification is directly connected with the poetry of modeling the garden area (the degree of its orderliness). Polish authors tend to present the garden as mostly organized though semantically open environment. In the Russian literature, the borders of the park exist only formally while its symbolic potential is more important. When actualizing the spatial model of the garden the principle of double coding is used: the combination of verbal and visual codes. When representing the mental and intellectual dimensions all three authors used index-symbolical signs. However, realization of the garden metaphor as well as of the metaphor of the life and history themselves put forward the iconic images.
Garden as a spatial locus; A cognitive scheme; Identification; JarosÃâ¦Ãâaw iwaszkiewicz; CzesÃâ¦Ãâaw MiÃâ¦Ãâosz; Anatoliy korolyov; Slavic literature
Every epoch is marked by its own intellectual instruments-figures of thought, cognitive schemes, constructing its ‘mental habitus’ [1] or ‘representative system’ [2,3]. Culture uses the schemes of thought to actualize abstract (conceptual) ideas. Ideas can be looked at as empty forms, which get a different configuration, ‘orchestration’ and conceptual filling, becoming a fact of intellectual discourse with the change of epochs, [4]. From this point of view, cognitive schemes can be treated as a picture of ideas and a map of their territories.
The main emphasis of the present work is connected with defining the cognitive-artistic potential of the spatial scheme garden. In particular, the text is about the possibilities of its usage as a means of identification. The goals of the paper are set according to the analyses of attributes, typical of any forms of abstractions actualization as well as according to the circle of meanings associated with the garden as a spatial locus.
We’re basing our ideas on the following statements.
First. Any cognitive schemes function as cultural constructs, marked by historicity [4]. Reality is not reflected in the schemes mirror-way but it is represented there. The mirror reflection isn’t explained by categorization while the representational scheme is based on the way of the world depicting and, correspondingly, of reality images creation. Thought schemes are born and reproduced, transformed, and replaced by the following schemes. This is the way how the history of ideas (intellectual history) gets its pivots.
Second. The schemes of thought as well as the rhetorical figures are connected with the forms of speech. Nevertheless, speaking about the schemes, we want to lay emphasis on their cognitive - not purely linguistic — character. The semiotic essence of the scheme is the double coding. Here we speak about the contamination of two ways of reality depicting, when index-symbolic and iconic representations work according to the principle of complementarity. This provides the possibility of the ‘visual’, sense perception of an idea and its emotional experience (Note 1). The principle of complementarity character of the verbal code (abstract) and visual (specific image) codes is essential for various discourses of culture, including those that appear to be predominantly associated only with the verbal code (philosophy, science or fiction). In these areas, we are dealing with inter-semiotic translation, when the visual image (including a mental one) hidden behind the text is transformed into the words. The ratio of the genuinely verbal (abstract ideas indexing) and ‘visual’ (their image actualization) may be different in, for example, philosophical and literary texts.
Thematically, the work continues a series of articles on garden semiotics [5,6]. However, in this article, the garden (as a symbol) is inscribed into the spatial scheme and becomes its character. To emphasize the universal nature of this scheme and to identify the cognitive capacity, we analyze the texts (mainly prose), in which the symbol of the garden is used to represent various forms of space (physical and mental). The research material was made by the texts belonging to the space of two Slavic literatures (Russian and Polish), written in the period of just over one decade of the 20th century (the 80-ies). This was the period when both in Poland and in Russia, the simplified mental and artistic designs dictated by the norms of socialist realism were replaced by a sophisticated perception of the world based on the cultural traditions revival, on the intellectual and esthetic reflection. Analyzing the writers, who developed the images-models of a garden, draws the attention to the general and specific features of a new fiction literature paradigm. Today the modern Slavonic studies obviously lack the works, in which character and the peculiarities of the literature processes in Slavic countries are compared. One of the possible approaches to the problem, in our opinion, is the analysis of stable cultural models, because it is in these models that principles of depiction which represent national world views are manifested. Let us name the texts in the order of their publication together with the brief bibliography reference:
Novel “Gardens” (“Ogrody”) by Yaroslav Ivashkevich [7] was first published in the magazine “TwórczoÃâ¦ÃâºÃâÃâ¡” in 1973. A year later Ivashkevich released this text as the second part of his existential triptych “Sny. Ogrody. Sérénité” leaving “Gardens” as the general title of the book.
“Garden of Sciences” (“Ogród nauk”) is one of the most meaningful philosophical - essays by Cheslav Milosz [8]. The book was published in 1979 in Paris in the publishing -house ‘Instytut Literacki’.
“Genius loci: a Tale of the Park” by Anatoliy Korolyov [9]. The year of the first publication in “Neva” journal is 1990.
Thus, we speak about a fragment of ‘genesis of a system of literary works created by one habitus’ [1]. Here are some important factors to consider these texts within the same paradigm. Garden, taken as a character, becomes a tool of narrative and gives the book its title. All the authors treat the gardens as a personified entities, whose cognitive processes are directly connected with corporeality and are, ‘embodied’ in a physical form (embodied cognition). Therefore a garden, with possessing its own language - vocabulary and grammar-encodes the ideas about space, becoming a semiotic object: like a book, or a text- for an external observer.
“Gardens” of Korolyov, Ivashkevich and Milosz are close in terms of artistic form too: each text that truly reflects the idea of a garden as a way of organizing space, is created as a composition of various gardens (variety of gardens), and this is directly stated in the prefaces to the books by the Polish authors. From the functional point of view, each garden is thought of as some space of identification and self-identification («the assemblage point» of the speaker/writer).
Finally, all of the above-mentioned texts are still deprived of direct attention of researchers and translators.
The present work on literary gardens is carried out in the context of research on cognitive poetics (Stockwell) and the semiotics of literature [10].
This article presents a system of forms of space representation. These are three variants of cognitive schemes involving the garden as a character, through which different ÃâÃÂognitive mapping of the space or environment is fulfilled [11]:
• Garden as the map of memory (mental space) of the individual.
• Garden as a way to represent the intellectual space of the culture.
• Garden as a tool of history representation, the eventful space of a whole country.
The choice of the mapping eventually defines the text picture of the world.
Let’s outline the plan to follow in a sequential analysis of each of the texts. First, we will make brief remarks about the potential of the garden symbol in European culture: the symbolic values that form the basis of ideas about the variety of dimensions (physical, historical, mental, text) and the ways of its arrangement (French Formal Garden vs English Landscape Park). The analysis of the textual ‘gardens’ is aimed at identifying features of space ‘mapping’ [12]. We will focus on the following characteristics: presence or absence of the clear boundaries in the garden and the degree of its objects’ discreteness; we will also identify the most significant semantic zones [13] and the degree of determinacy of moving itineraries around the garden suggested by a thought scheme/map; and finally, we will dwell on the semiotics of space representation, i.e. about the correlation between the verbal and the imaginary. As a result, the analysis will conclude that the space of three literary gardens becomes the point of identification of the subject with the country's history, intellectual history, and authors’ self-images.
When analyzing literary gardens of the late 20th century, we rely on the works on the poetics of gardens as a text of culture [14] and garden as a literary genre [15-19] The focus of the studies mentioned is on the symbolism of the garden in the history of European culture, rhetorical canon as the foundation for creation/ interpretation of literary gardens, as well as on the processes of reconstruction and transformation of the garden as a genre in the literature of the 20-th century. The European tradition of literary and musical ‘gardens’ was formed in the discursive space of silvas, vineyards gardens of virtue and florilegia, building on the symbolic potential of the ‘garden’ sign. As a semiotic object a garden expresses:
The idea of the collection, which presents the diversity of individual existence examples
The idea of life as an a priori expected freedom (in the garden there are areas where the plants grow as they want, against the gardener’s will), or, on the contrary, of life as an already organized semiotic space (a regular garden). Another meaning is connected with the garden as a space of choice because a person’s life is similar to a forest of possibilities;
The idea of order, the organization of the locus, the harmony of the world [20]
In this context, we shall note: the intention of this article is to move from the already well-trodden path of thought. We will talk about the garden as cognitive spatial form used in the literature as a tool for identification.
For Y. Ivashkevich, a garden is the space, which absorbed the time of his life. Six gardens-parks (composite parts in the ‘"Ogrody"’ story) become the loci, where the author’s memory places ‘the composition of landscapes, people, conversations, events’, creating their topology (topograficzne umiejscowienie w ogrodach). Life, placed in the six gardens, becomes a text, which can be ‘read’ repeatedly:
DÃâ¦Ãâugo nie Ãâ¦ÃâºpiÃâÃâ¢, a w mej pamiÃâÃâ¢ci, przed moimi oczami przechodzÃâÃ⦠ogrody, ogrody, ogrody[7]
(I can’t fall asleep for a long time, and what the memory puts before my eyes is gardens, gardens, gardens).
Here is the exact sequence of these gardens-texts. Each of them has its own vocabulary, its own system of referents; however, they share the same method of encoding meanings: behind the index, introducing the object of the physical world into the one’s world view, there is an associative chain of symbolic meanings.
Thus, the texts about space-time intervals of physical reality at the same time talk about another dimension of space- the world of ideal entities that make up the true meaning and purpose of human existence: friendship, love, music, poetry, wisdom, selffulfillment.
Ivashkevich associates the first garden with the memories of his early childhood. In the ‘enchanted space’ (przestrzeÃâ¦Ãâ zaczarowana) under two old pears, he often had visions of strange naked bodies: Gustave Dore’s animated illustrations to the Bible. This is the first experience of visualizations when the sign, replacing reality, creates a different, more authentic reality.
The garden in Timoshovka is associated with the beginning of the road leading to a never-to-be-completed understanding of the mystery (wtajemniczenie) of Schubert’s, Mahler’s and Brahms’ music.
Byshev is the first experiment of contemplation, maximum concentration (skupienie) and intensity of thought (intensywnoÃâ¦ÃâºÃâÃâ¡ myÃâ¦Ãâºlenia), the first conscious attempts to perceive the world not only with physical senses, but also with the intellect, leaving far behind the possibilities of the physical body.
Ivashkevich determines the Geneva Park Des Eaux Vives in Geneva as a park of philosophers, where along with the pure joy of thinking he got the realization that knowledge is does not always help to cope with life's difficulties. So, Oppenheimer’s wisdom by no means made the mankind’s simplify the person’s life easier and did not teach how to avoid everything that became the resulted from his discoveries.
The park in Palermo is permeated with the scent of orange trees in bloom. All his life Ivashkevich perceived this smell as an index of ‘fullness of life’”, its ‘coming fulfillment”’ (speÃâ¦Ãânienie), the sign in which the beauty of the world is forever found its true embodiment (urzeczywistnienie).
And finally, Stawisko -“an old man’s garden”, basically, is not a garden, but a house, the woods and the memories about a nonexistent garden, where cherry, apple and sweet cherry trees used to grow. In the field in front of the house, there are lonely pines, each more than two hundred years old. Ivashkevich wrote about one of them in the year of his death: ‘Urania, my sister, the goddess of heaven, bury me under your roots; I'll become a pine, a Urania, nothing-under your crown’ [21]. Stawisko is the space of loneliness, slow fading and leaving of everything around that is outside and inside (ÃâÃâ¬rzemijanie).
The reverse side of the intensive presence in the world are the minutes of slow tranquility, the withdrawing from the physical reality, meditative insight, accepting the end:
I wtedy do gÃâ¦ÃâÃâÃâ¢bi czuje siÃâÃ⢠samotnoÃâ¦ÃâºÃâÃâ¡, opuszczenie, powolne zanikanie wszystkiego naokoÃâ¦Ãâo. I wszystkiego w sobie [7] and then the acute loneliness, abandonment, slow dissolving of everything around is felt—and of everything inside oneself.
On accepting the idea of leaving, a person (it seems paradoxical only at the first sight), loves more not the people who are close, but rather those, whose locus of existence has already shifted to memory and imagination. In this context, Ivashkevich spoke about Edgar and ElÃâ¦Ã¼bieta (characters of the story ‘SÃâ¦Ãâawa i chwaÃâ¦Ãâa’): ‘I loved them very much, maybe just because they never existed’ [22]. In the same context, it’ is meaningful that in the last of the gardens (Stawiskoi) not a single word is said about the family, close people. In this park there are only the things that are long gone by now: minutes of the occupation, director Jerzy Zarzycki (Note 2), snapdragons flowers, once adorning a potato field with their presence, ‘dog cemetery ’inhabitants’ ” - a wonderful Persian cat Micus, a parrot Cocosya, eaten by a hungry dog at the beginning of the war. There are no people in this garden, unlike all others, there’re no people, not even the dead ones. The topology of the six gardens altogether in general and of each one taken separately is an iconic sign of memory space and at the same time a map of its territory. In the degree of accuracy level of the hypertext nature of human thinking is actualized. Thus, the transitions between the separate events are only outlined by implicit associations and are added on somewhat arbitrarily. The route of travel across the memory is equally arbitrary. The memories mapping is inconclusive, it did not exclude that new gardens could be added to the space of life, and some events could move from one garden to another. Hence Ivashkevich wrote: ‘In my gardens poetry, is more important than the truth’ [7]. The story cannot be presented as a chronological sequence, but should be perceived only as an emotionally piercing whole:
To wszystko razem nie ukÃâ¦Ãâada siÃâÃ⢠w jakiÃâ¦Ã⺠ciÃâÃâ¦g chronologiczny, tylko w przejmujÃâÃâ¦cÃâÃ⦠caÃâ¦ÃâoÃâ¦ÃâºÃâÃâ¡! [7].
Memory is this space of the stopped time, where all the events are exclusively owned by the now moment. In the garden of childhood memories (and Ivashkevich says it is forever) grandmother Chechersky is sitting near the pergola summer house. In the Swiss ‘park of philosophers’ the thinkers of modernity come out from behind the trees, disputing about human destiny, knowledge, and eternity. And these objects do not seem extremely complex, unknowable, beyond the capabilities of human intelligence either to them or to us. The water surface of the lake in this park forever absorbed the reflections of Adam and Juliusz’ faces . In the park in Sicily, Ivashkevich walks with long gone Karol Simanowski and Raney Lanskoy (Note 3) again and again slowly, as if along the Champs-Elysees. Everyone who is gone, all that, it would seem, to have become the past, continues to grow in the memories (roÃâ¦Ãâºnie we wspomnieniu), becoming real and full of life. This is the sense of the novel leitmotif: filling and fullness of the world (urzeczywistnienie, speÃâ¦Ãânienie). Ivashkevich’s six gardens make a representative system, aimed at the iconic presentation of his memory space: associative network of the texts that exist, like the world for a person in the present ‘now’ moment. At the same time, such representation enables the subject of speech to assemble a panorama of views on oneself. The self who is writing now (I often dream about this garden), and the self who recalls how he was reading ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’ by William James in Byshev, - all these are surely nothing more than time and space dimensions of one and the same personality.
Who is this ‘self’, depicted in Ivashkevich’s ‘Gardens’?
He is the one who perceives the world not just through the variety of the physical details, but as if ‘in between’, via the interference of its basic meanings. He hears and sees ‘dim images’: halftones of sounds, colour shades and lights (sleepy garden, covered with a light coat of fog). He easily transits into the space of intellectual thought and worlds created by the languages of art-music and painting. He is the one who in the end finds the fullness of the world: its maximum actualization and fulfilment. Still the fullness and fulfilment are related not so much to the world, as to its text incarnation: only that is significant, is what has remained in memory as a text, something as a garden.
Defining the genre and compositional nature of his ‘Garden’, Czeslaw Milosz notes: this is a garden of ideas, a garden of sciences. Like a gardener, the poet throws culture seeds of universals into the soil of culture, cultivates concepts, collects the intellectual harvest. This is a very ‘personal book’, essentially, it is an intellectual diary.
Year after year, Milosz included extensive quotes from those authors, with whom his thought sounded in unison or in one tonality: first of all, these were W. Blake, B. Pascal S. Weyl O. Milosz F. Dostoevsky F. Nietzsche. Thus, the intellectual diary allows you to declare implicitly about one’s “humility” from the position of a philosopher and a poet: all that we have now we owe to our predecessors. Creating a garden of thoughts, Milosz continues the genre tradition of European literary gardens (silvas, vineyards gardens of virtue and florilegia), whose organizing principle of which was the idea of space itself [17]. Silvas (lat. silva rerum, a forest of things) is the name for family chronicles (so-called ‘family Bibles’"), which records kept by several generations. They were particularly popular in the Polish literature of the Baroque era (Zachara) [23]. From a semiotic point of view, silva is a collection of texts, created within different sign systems. Such a collection would normally included verbal narratives: mentioning of significant events of the clan, family stories, anecdotes, fragments of diaries, letters, poems, prose passages. These were accompanied by texts in non-verbal languages of the culture: proprietary tangible memory marks tokens (a lock of hair, a pressed flower), notation of favorite tunes, and pictures. Nonverbal texts performed the function of ‘turning-back’ narratives: picking up the pressed flower, it was possible to experience the love story again. Through interpretation of such a system of signs belonging to different culture languages, the reader eventually created his own meta-narrative that connected these texts into a single space and at the same time allowed to complete the missing fragments of the narration and thus, to reconstruct a family chronicle.
Vertograd, or collections of different topic texts, as a rule, were intended for the instruction and enlightenment education (‘“Vertograd mnogotsvetnyi”’ [Multicolour Vertograd] by S. Polotsky). Florilegium (florilegia) is also a collection, but, for example, of music works. The organizing principle of these musical suites -- ‘bouquets’ is still the same stylistic heterogeneity of dance parts (allemande, courante, sarabande, rigadoon, pavana and others). Series of suites by George Moffat ‘Florilegium Primum’ and ‘Florilegium Secundum’ (1695 and 1698) or a Suite by Jacob van Eyck ‘Fluyten Lust-hof’ (‘The Flute's Garden of Delights’, 1645) could be named as example. In a figurative sense, the concept of florilegium was also used to denote a compilation of works, an anthology, including fragments from various sources, most often, the Bible.
In this context, Milosz also defines his text as ‘the book of different things’ (ksiÃâÃâ¢ga róÃâ¦Ã¼noÃâ¦Ãâºci). At the first sight, it is really a mosaic of themes and genres. The first part of the book consists of extracts from other texts and commentaries to them. The second part consists of Milosz’s own translations of Charles Baudelaire, O. Milosz, T. Merton, T. Venclova U. Whitman and others’ texts into Polish. The last part presents the translation of the book of Ecclesiastes, Milosz considered this work to be the most significant stage in his biography of a poet and a translator. However, all the translations are also accompanied by philosophical and philological commentary. Thus, the book of Milosz is a homogeneous space of metatexts-texts which tell about other texts. This raises a distinct feeling that the birth of ideas never happens all of a “suddenly”. Basing on the system of presuppositions in the intellectual history, one can say that every idea occurs on the experience of other ideas and at their intersections. The culture functions as a meta-textual semiotic space, where a sign speaks about another sign, and a text speaks about another text. That’s why the cited ‘“original’” texts do not exist autonomously in the garden of Milosz, but germinate into interpretations: comments and translations. Any idea of facing is aimed at the future: it is only the root of the tree or a sapling, which will eventually put forth. It is no coincidence that in the book of Ecclesiastes, translated by Milosz, there is such a line:
ZaÃâ¦ÃâoÃâ¦Ã¼yÃâ¦Ãâem ogrody i sady a w nich zaszczepiÃâ¦Ãâem wszelkie drzewo dajÃâÃâ¦ce owoce [8].
Author laid out gardens
And there author planted the trees which bear fruit.
After W. Blake, Milosz believed that the most important place in human life is taken by the process of ‘intellectual hunting’: contemplating on philosophical objects, ultimate in their complexity. Their ideal nature itself, it would seem, should force people to give up cognizing them. However, struggling with his own language, a philosopher tirelessly ‘cultivates’ abstraction, creating intellectual history in this process.
Milosz puts concepts, which, as he writes, fill the air of the era into his intellectual garden. These are creativity, reality, time, power of language, heaven/hell, the ideal reader, interpretation. But how exactly does this growth happen? It begins at the point, where the idea is fixed in the extracts from the books (including dictionaries and encyclopaedias). A quote from the original text is seen by Milosz as a kind of the initial definition of the notion. Actually, a very long period of philosophical polishing of the ideas can stand behind it, but the author will be basing his ideas precisely on its final state. The growth and development of ideas occurs in a series of comments when Milosz offers his own ways of development of another person’s ideas in a series of comments. Thus, it is possible to assume that in order to create a ‘garden of sciences’ Milosz used medieval technologies of collective reading and writing, known by the name of marginalia. Marginalia (lat. marginalis, i.e. located on the edge) are comments on the books’ margins in the form of interpretations of text passages, notated thoughts about the reading, pictures, and notes. However, in its genre characteristics ‘The Garden of Sciences’ is closer to another understanding: marginalia can exist as an independent text in the form of glossa collecta, where glossa-comments are published independently from the commented text [24].
When creating the garden of ideas Milosz used different cognitive operations: analogy, interpretation, translation, semantic compression / expansion of terms from the source text, etc. All of them perform the function of the visual code, helping to revive abstractions: to highlight their implicit meanings, to speak out something non-obvious, to create the effect of epiphany, or the visual presence [25]. Milosz emphasizes the following: imagination, as in W. Blake’s terms sees it, frees the man from the captivity of his physical body, allowing him to overcome the force of gravity. What is actualized in an artistic image has to be our greatest reality and availability.
In this sense, Milosz’s garden is not dead but a functioning art object [14]. The comments or notes on the margins, play an important role in the life of the texts of culture: it is the dialogue of thinkers which makes up its history [26]. Let us add that the Milosz’s concepts are directly related to the daily practice of Milosz the poet, translator, philosopher and this also becomes an argument in favor of the idea of a garden of sciences as the space full of living concepts. Milosz repeatedly identified himself as a historian of ideas [27], whose task is associated with the direct participation in the intellectual history development. In this context we will demonstrate the history of the concept of creativity. Milosz selects the binary structure made of words in English and Polish languages to become a sign of his biography: creativity / gorliwoÃâ¦ÃâºÃâÃâ¡ (creativity / zeal). To determine the cognitive potential of the word creative, we analyzed the articles from the defining dictionaries of contemporary English: creative means the one who has the ability to create. However, it is rather doubtful (the growth of the idea starts at this point) that in the history of mankind, such a trait would define some special, exclusive side of the personality.
In this sense, Milosz’s garden is not dead but a functioning art object [14]. The comments or notes on the margins, play an important role in the life of the texts of culture: it is the dialogue of thinkers which makes up its history [26]. Let us add that the Milosz’s concepts are directly related to the daily practice of Milosz the poet, translator, philosopher and this also becomes an argument in favor of the idea of a garden of sciences as the space full of living concepts. Milosz repeatedly identified himself as a historian of ideas [27], whose task is associated with the direct participation in the intellectual history development. In this context we will demonstrate the history of the concept of creativity. Milosz selects the binary structure made of words in English and Polish languages to become a sign of his biography: creativity / gorliwoÃâ¦ÃâºÃâÃâ¡ (creativity / zeal). To determine the cognitive potential of the word creative, we analyzed the articles from the defining dictionaries of contemporary English: creative means the one who has the ability to create. However, it is rather doubtful (the growth of the idea starts at this point) that in the history of mankind, such a trait would define some special, exclusive side of the personality.
Drawing a parallel with contemporary art, Milosz notes: in the past, to paint a landscape at the sun setting, it was necessary to have certain abilities and diligence. In the era of mass culture, mediocrity successfully covers its unprofessionalism by loud mottoes like ‘boldness’ or, ‘avant-garde’. The concept of ‘creativity’ historically should be associated with the birth of Romanticism. In the framework of the Romantic movement, according to Milosz, a poet is allowed to consider oneself a unique personality who like God, is able to be a prophet, to create worlds out of words. Creativity, in the Romantic understanding, can be compared with the process of hunting. The only difference is that here, instead of a hare, the man tries to catch the elusive soul, or the essence of human etc. This word made its career in modern English, actualizing the concept in insignificant creative art, creative writing, creative evolution. The Polish language did not know the word creativity until in the middle of the 20-th century it became the title of the main literary monthly magazine (‘“TwórczoÃâ¦ÃâºÃâÃâ¡’”). It is difficult to determine who exactly should be called creative people. Should they be virtuoso pianists, jazz musicians, architects, film directors, choreographers, dancers? Representatives of literature, arts, philosophy and theology enrich the army of the so-called creative intellectuals. But what exactly do they create, standing out as a separate caste?
Milosz says: art is not isolated from the concepts of money, success, circulation. Does this mean, then, that, for example, literature production is determined, in the end, by those who have the power and capital? We also take into account W. Blake’s idea saying that the growing role of science is detrimental to the human imagination, then in the late 20-th century one must doubt the existence of free (from the world) creativity.
However, we can move the creativity into the space of semiotic systems, describing it as the potential of possible combinations offered by the language itself. Then the aim of a poet or a composer is not primarily the result- the created work, but the process of creativity, the essential features of which are labour, diligence, and skill.
Analyzing the reverse side of creativity, Milosz introduces the notion gorliwoÃâ¦ÃâºÃâÃâ¡ as a component of this concept. The meanings of the word perfectly describe all prerequisites for the creation of text best of all: conscientiousness, integrity, diligence, zeal, and on the periphery-there are passion, enthusiasm, joy of creation and, as a result, pride in a well-done work. Diligence and skill-are they not the most essential components in a poet’s work?
The same is in the work of a translator, who seeks to detect the equilibrium point where repetition of the original and the creativity of its rephrasing get balanced. The text creator, and its commentator, and translator, equally, they all combine the work of a copyist and a co-creator, because they get involved in previously created texts and expand the space of the previouslysaid. How shall we move around Milosz’s garden of ideas, and what degree of compositional regularity is suggested by its author the gardener? Milosz says: kaleidoscopic nature of my garden assumes entitles that the reader is entitled to rely on chance, choosing separate chapters about individual concepts (“TwórczoÃâ¦ÃâºÃâÃâ¡”, “RzeczywistoÃâ¦ÃâºÃâÃâ¡”) in the book or reading the translations in any sequence. And yet there exists the hidden map of the garden exists. Reference glossaries, creating transitions between concepts and performing the function of semantical ties of the book, become one of text-providing principles in the ‘“Garden of science”’. Thus, the interpretation of reality concept begins with determining its semantic boundaries within the chapter with the same name (“RzeczywistoÃâ¦ÃâºÃâÃâ¡”). Reality is the essence of things of the physical world. However, no less real is the existence of ideas in the mental space of the speaker, and equally real is (here Milosz supports W. Blake) ‘“the lining of the world”’ (podszewka Ãâ¦Ãâºwiata) the place of universal notions.
Realizing dependence of reality from the other concepts, Milosz returns to it in his contemplation about the localization of Heaven and Hell: everything that was said about these spaces by Dante, E. Swedenborg and J. Milton suggests the idea of authenticity and reality of these loci. Swedenborg puts Hell and Paradise inside the human persinality, making them truly exist. Milosz speaks about reality when analyzing realism in literature: worlds created by means of the language are real, but none of the texts should be considered realistic (in the usual customary sense of the word), because the power that the language has over us, does not allow the possibility of absolute mimesis.Theoretically, an attentive reader may actualize the author’s map of movement from concept to concept. However, the path of interpretation of each idea through others will lead him into a semantic maze, a circle of interpretations:
• Now that we have expressed, it seems, all major points of view, what are we to do?
• To start thinking from the very beginning [8].
During a stroll through the garden of ideas, the issue of authorship raises inevitably, i.e. the possibility of self-identity in culture. Who is the author of ‘Garden of science’? Making notes in the margins of intellectual history, Milosz at the same time acts as a reader, an interpreter, a critic, a researcher-philologist, a translator and a hermit an anchorite living in the book culture. It seems that the cogitative process from a stranger’s to one’s own doesn’t allow to determine one’s boundaries in culture: here, for example, it is still Blake, and here is Milosz. However, it is necessary to say that this book was created by Milosz not for the purpose of identification. The poet says: ‘connection’ to the space of culture, assimilation of one’s own and others’ allowed to feel not only a part of the world intellectual history but a rightful creator [8]. Identification of the self with the culture does not obliterate the authorship. For example, the choice of the method to actualize and deployment explicate ideas similar to the author's signature. Likewise the work on translation is a process of connection to the other’s idea thought space and it involves the choice of how to represent it in the space of another language. When commenting, Milosz's does not just get others’ words beautified but makes the idea grow, gain strength, maintains establishes its importance in the epoch he writes for. Walks through the garden of sciences create the effect of thought that emerges at the moment of reading and lives freely, outside the canonical boundaries of genres, balancing between poetry and prose, the academic lecture and recording the one’s ‘thoughts out aloud’. This, according to Milosz, lets permits one to be honest, not ‘literary’, that is, in the end, to define one’s place in the culture.
During a stroll through the garden of ideas, the issue of authorship raises inevitably, i.e. the possibility of self-identity in culture. Who is the author of ‘Garden of science’? Making notes in the margins of intellectual history, Milosz at the same time acts as a reader, an interpreter, a critic, a researcher-philologist, a translator and a hermit an anchorite living in the book culture. It seems that the cogitative process from a stranger’s to one’s own doesn’t allow to determine one’s boundaries in culture: here, for example, it is still Blake, and here is Milosz. However, it is necessary to say that this book was created by Milosz not for the purpose of identification. The poet says: ‘connection’ to the space of culture, assimilation of one’s own and others’ allowed to feel not only a part of the world intellectual history but a rightful creator [8]. Identification of the self with the culture does not obliterate the authorship. For example, the choice of the method to actualize and deployment explicate ideas similar to the author's signature. Likewise the work on translation is a process of connection to the other’s idea thought space and it involves the choice of how to represent it in the space of another language. When commenting, Milosz's does not just get others’ words beautified but makes the idea grow, gain strength, maintains establishes its importance in the epoch he writes for. Walks through the garden of sciences create the effect of thought that emerges at the moment of reading and lives freely, outside the canonical boundaries of genres, balancing between poetry and prose, the academic lecture and recording the one’s ‘thoughts out aloud’. This, according to Milosz, lets permits one to be honest, not ‘literary’, that is, in the end, to define one’s place in the culture.
Anatoly Korolev’s novel ‘Genio loci. The story of the Park’ presents the garden as a place, which captured the national history in itself in its bizarre and sometimes tragic turns. The history of the park begins from paganism times (Perun’s grove), from the first crusade stone of the monastery garden and further develops in accord with changes in the garden landscape architecture: the place turns into a regular French, then English landscape park. In the twentieth century, it is already a Park for Recreation and Leisure [Park Kultury I Otdykha], a place of execution, a hospital. Korolyov describes the park in its constant changes. At the same time, the garden appears as an out-of-history embodiment (sometimes distorted by the circumstances of the time) of the idea of beauty itself (sometimes distorted by the circumstances of the time), existing parallel to any history. A. Korolyov begins his narrative with an introduction of ‘happy area’ which is empty, but so beautiful that this emptiness seems to be waiting for the man [9]. Further the narrative is devoted to the description of the empty space planning and development -the transformation of nature into culture, that is, in the end, into the system of signs. The first chapter of the novel is symptomatically called ‘“A green dictionary”’ (here the basics of the language seem to be formed) while in the last chapter the park is called the green chronicle (i.e. a text). In the descriptions of the landscape the terminology of literary poetics is involved - caesura, syntax, manifested in punctuation marks in the form of flowers: The rocks abandoned by the glacier lay down covered waist-deep in the flowers. Songbirds came flying into the silence of such deep caesure. The bushes of wild roses and hazel stepped out from the forests to the sun. Enriching the local dictionary on the net blank tablets of spaciousness, forget-me-nots, poppies, yellow tansy omission points, commas of carnations, blue dots and red caps majuscules started to showed up colourfully [9].
Such a text-like organization of landscape, according to Korolyov, requires a human reader - the human. And each of the gardeners, who had been changing the park for centuries, is also the reader of the text of Nature and the author of ‘amendments’ to it. In these three projections the ideas of harmonic beauty, of reflected history and of textuality-in- creation the narration develops, and the park becomes its main protagonist. The interaction of the indicated projections forms the internal dynamics of the plot of this story, devoid of the usual thematic grounds that enables us to define the genre of this text as topoekphrasis [28]. Originally, the park was interpreted as Eden, already translucent in the pagan beauty, as a locus, ‘where the first gardener was the Lord himself’. The layout of the garden is interpreted as a symbolic incarnation of the Christian values: plants form a circle of purity, which fits into the square, where red flowers symbolize drops of the Christ’s blood. Thus, the writer sets the index-symbolic code of reading the park. Copying the structure of the garden of Eden, the gardener (art in general, - as the author of the story claims) affects the arrangement of existence: he projects the Eden gardens onto the real space thus re-creating the reality. Korolyov considers this process of the art modifying the life to be the basis of national aesthetics and ethics. It is important that the desired harmony appears to be both a priori given and created as in the description of the garden, some kind of aesthetic measure is always found. This measure is set by the view of another creator, not of God the demiurge, but of the artist. Often the generalized figure of the artist is embodied in Pushkin though he never visited the described garden who is the important figure of the gardenlanguage and garden-text. However, at the time when ‘the design was falling down from the heaven onto the picturesque terraces’, the national history gives many reasons for separating culture from the pre-established harmony: revolutions, wars, and repressions are the evil echo in the garden.
Although the image of the garden in its directly-sensual, iconic incarnation, is developed by Korolyov very sophisticatedly (the text is replete with beautiful, deep, fresh descriptions-ekphrases), the genre of Korolyov’s story is above all, a cultural essay, a research result in the spirit of intellectual story.
Every time the writer sees the projection of the total general one can say, epistemological laws of historical time in the way the park changes. Following the spirit of national historiographical traditions, the main role in the author's philosophy of the park history is given to the analysis of power. The author notes that landscape styles are in direct accordance with the manner of the ruling. Insisting that our statehood since Catherine’s times obeyed not the historical laws but the aesthetic norms (from the citizens’ dress code to the labour of the masses, from the aesthetics of private and simple to total aesthetics of the authorities, focused exclusively on state of mind), we chose as an example our centuryold park, which easily and clearly shows how the waves of life and normative aesthetics, combs and scissors of thoughts are leave their traves. But why the park? There is one secret starting from the Eden times, the park is always a view of the ideal. Annibale’s park is a view of the Motherland ideals.
The ideals were changed with the change of power, and every new cultural paradigm is rethought by Korolyov semiotically. He describes the beginning of Peter’s era as ‘the island of new semantics, where everything, literally everything, from the blade at the toe of a jack boot to the Admiralty Spitz became the symbols and emblems of the new sign system, the letters of Peter’s ABC book’.Along with the analysis of power, the writer traces the history of the language. Pre-Peter’s thickets are compared with the Cyrillic alphabet, and the new style, which brought bureaucratese, is compared to infantry. The trunk of Russian speech is entwined with the ‘shoots of dyslalia’.
Description of the park being formed is compared similar to language and text, and this comparison is supported by the intertextual strategy of narration. Korolyov’s history is shown through the ready-made mythology mainly cultural. All the stories being told about people, associated with the garden, are as if being woven from the existing historical anecdotes and literary motifs. An example is the description of Empress Anna Ioannovna’s visit to count Golovin. Such is the plot (this is the way the author himself calls his pasted narratives about people, highlighting the word by italics) about Katenka Ivina, a variation of motives of Pushkin's ‘The Storm’ and images of Turgenev’s girlcharacters. The garden owners in the early twentieth century, reminiscent of the Gorky's characters in ‘Klim Samgin’s Life’, or of Sologub’s ‘Small Devil’, in their turn, make their life a copy of the picture by Orest Somov. The names of the heroes with wood, garden semantics: Flor Golovin, Katenka Ivina, Konstantin Dubrovin — emphasize the secondary role of characters and plot in comparison to the total-mythological, non-narratives, generalized-culturological nature of Korolyov’s text. The main characters are derived from the spirit and body of the park, its metonymic attributes.The palimpsest of cultural and literary signs is created intentionally, because the park for Korolyov is primarily a product of culture. When the culture coincides with the divine drawing manifested by nature and maintained by the genio loci, the park has a chance to reveal itself in harmony, which is still unattainable in in the conditions of Russia's tragic history. Its course is determined by the logic of cultural regression. This logic is emphasized by the representation of space: the author consistently describes various levels of the park, its terraces, but focuses not on his constant features, but on the many new principles of transformation. From the very beginning outset, Korolyov selects some important signs-objects, which reflect the changes: the oak, which survived all the trials and was reborn, grew out of Perun’s groves, then it was called Pericles, and was chopped down during the war... The column with Minerva’s bust, then Hannibal’s bust: he changes the name of Hannibal into the name of August Bebel in the years after the revolution. The fate of these markers-attributes eloquently testifies to the idea of endless repetition, but of regress too. Park repeats the cycle of death and rebirth, which stresses the importance of the mythological model in the base of the described loci.
Closer to the present time the stability of the cycle seems to be more questionable. Hope for the park salvation (and, accordingly, national destiny salvation) at the end is associated with the metaphysical, mystical, beyond history phenomenon. This is the phenomenon of genio loci terrain, treated by Korolyov as an eye of nature. The hero sees ‘the rainbow spar, which was opened on the ground sadly in the patchy thick green periwinkle crosses, like an oval of mirror amalgam, pearl eye white with grassy veins’. The existence of this magical eye is very brightly described in the story, but questioned by the inadequate state of the unreliable observer of the phenomenon: the last savior of the park, desperate Avangard Molokoedov, is just drunk. His visions of the beautifuly drawn sign and of the mystical spar receive a dual motivation: it is unclear if it is clairvoyance or simply a drunken visionhallucination of the drunk. The last chapter of the story -‘Hard manna’ is only a chain of three dots, like the tenth chapter of ‘Eugene Onegin’. The garden is threatened to be covered by deadly dust of the cement factory construction processed nearby. The myth underlying the description of the locus, threatens to become eschatological, but leaves hope for the resumption of the cycle.
The above-mentioned observations show that Korolyov’s garden is far from genre traditions of European gardens-collections. Preserving the semantics of memory, he captures, rather, the processes of its successive destruction in the course of national history. Multiple repetitions of descriptions of self-healing garden after disastrous interventions of the society, the initial sketch representation in it, are repetition, the eradication of historical trauma in the artistic experience. In Russian literature, replete with images of the garden (this is especially true for the poetry- Tyutchev, Fet, Pushkin, Blok, Pasternak and others), the 1980-s became the time when the garden is not a metaphor of Eden, of fate, of a pathway anymore, but the exact spatial embodiment of culture poisoned by time and traumatized history. Especially sharply this was manifested in the Russian poetry of the 1970-s and 1980-s, the period when Russian writers were trying to get away from the social to the cultural and philosophical reflection. In the poetry of Ivan Zhdanov, for example, the garden is looking at the man, like at the end of Korolyov’s story:
Spring garden will hang on the branches,
Like the decorative dust regaining consciousness.
The empty heaven’s memories of the white clouds are floating overhead already.
It will hold you up close to the face
Like a mirror, but half detached, Winding the music to the end By on a weakening the spring of gramophone [29].
The verses by a Ural poet V. Kalpidi (‘Oh, the garden!’) present a wide spectrum of metaphorical meanings of the garden. Garden is a world of soul (‘How well I feel in the garden of my exalted offense/, with this world, that is mysteriously laid for two’), the world in general, a garden-motherland, which was neglected by the gone friends swifts, the garden of Eden, the garden of literature (where even the ‘blue heaven’ is blue ‘in honour of N. Baratashvili’). A garden is a space of one’s own creativity: here the poet, irrigating the dry barren sand with the tears of inspiration, is building his own unique world from the damp sand. Together with the text ‘Oh, the garden!’, as Kalpidi remarks in the comments, the poem ‘Oh, covert!’ is written, or rather, not written, but imagined. This expands the field of values further: the world corresponds to the anti-world, cosmos matches with chaos [30].
In Olga Sedakova and Helen Schwartz’s poetry the garden becomes one of the most frequent toposesi, and the image of the gardener represents God. Thus, in the Russian literature of the 1980-s the image of the garden eloquently represents the image of the world as a complex interplay of multiple realities. In this context, Korolyov’s story finds its current substantial potential as a way of the generation’s identification in culture.
We have described the image of the garden as a symbolic modelling of reality, which appeared in the 1980-ies in two Slavic literatures. Habitus as the art of invention is what allows to conducting the infinitely large number of practices. The homogeneity of the habitus makes practices predictable. Still, the inherent possibility of subjective probability of development provides continuous establishing of the original scheme [1]. As “a coordinating beam of the form” [31], the garden reflected the ever existing symbolic meanings (paradise, life, path), and also actualized historically specific values, revealed the strategies of the artist’s (or a whole generation of artists) self-identification at a specific time interval. The link with the idea of memory, embodied in culture, became common for the described schemes, or representations of the garden. The culture at this time seemed to re-open to the writer and the reader, who were excommunicated in the Soviet years from the recognition of its value. This is the sense core of the appearing structure. In this regard, in Russian and Polish literature of this period the idea of the text-comments is revived. Each of the texts, we analyzed here, can be seen as a palimpsest-a comment on the margins of culture itself. It allows you to read three ‘“gardens”’ as a single text.
However, national variations are also detected in the invariant. Speaking of the garden as a tool of identification, we note its various aspects. The Polish authors talk about identity (Ivashkevich), artistic identification with culture (Milosz). In the use of the garden spatial scheme, the Polish literature traces a clear link with the tradition of the genre-silvas, florilegia as gardens-collections. Ivashkevich’s garden is a collection of personal memories, while the garden of Milosz is a garden of ideas. In the Russian literature of this period, the tasks of generational (in poetry) and national (by Korolyov) identification appear more up-to-date. The phrase I was there too (meaning in the park) appears on the last pages of Korolyov’s story. In the poetics of modelling the garden space the differences relate to the extent of its orderliness and clarity of boundaries. The Polish authors present the garden in a more organized way, though semantically an open space (an ordered collection, which adds more and more new exhibits). A. Korolyov, on the contrary, makes the inner borders of the park focused only in situations of change, while the principles of harmony are all being destroyed by chaos. At the end of the story, the hero gets lost in it, and the genius of the place has no place, the exact localization, has a ghostly mystical nature. In the texts of Russian poetry of this period the garden is associated not with the idea of organization but with metaphysical and religious semantics (God as the gardener), which is obviously due to the more radical and painful in comparison to Poland, falling away from the religious tradition in the preceding decades. As the spatial model and a tool of identification, the garden, apparently, has not yet exhausted its potential. Further study of this subject by other authors, in any other era would come to informative generalizations of theoretical and historical-literary character. In fact, according to the fare Borges’s remark, ‘“maybe the world history is the history of several metaphors”’ [32-34]. Garden is for sure one of them.
The study was supported by grant 058-P of the strategic development program by PSSPU.
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