Keywords:
images of Italy, cultural landscape, perception, Russian culture, Italian culture, "Italian text", "Neapolitan text", toponymic narrative, toponymic text, narrative semantics, myth, mythologem
To cite this article
Denisova G.V., Kalanki Andrea
Semantics of the Cultural Landscape of Naples in Russian and Italian Fiction. // Theory and History of Art.
2026.
N 1,
p.80–93
https://doi.org/10.55959/MSU2411-0795-2026-1-06.
The article studies the image of Naples within the humanities paradigm of exploring geographical spaces, following after S. Averintsev, N. Arutyunova, A. Gabrichevsky, S. Gardzonio, G. Kaganov, M. Kagan, S. Neklyudov, N. Tolstaya, V. Toporov, A. Flier, P. Florensky, T. Tsivyan. These scholars approached the question from a historical-cultural perspective and concluded toponymic image to be an element of discourse. Advancing the research in the field, the authors ponder on the concept of "toponymic texts". They claim that in Russian culture the "Italian text" — including the "Neapolitan text" — has generated diverse connotative meanings, and is now being viewed through the prism of the set of all these meanings, thus becoming part of an integral entity. Not infrequently, though, the resultant "text" may come into contradiction with the meanings generated within contemporary Italian culture. The authors exploit cultural analysis to approach stylistic and ideological tendencies observed in modern Italian "Neapolitan texts" (E. Ferrante, R. Saviano, etc.) as compared to the images of the city created by J. W. von Goethe and F. Stendhal, on the one hand, and those of Kingdom of Naples as seen by Russian travelers in the 19th century, primarily based on the correspondence of the Bulgakov brothers, on the other. The image of Naples created in the "Russian Neapolitana" is compared with the works of R. Saviano and E. Ferrante; in this contrastive analysis the image of Naples is viewed as a "myth", considered as a narrative including a plot unfolding in under specific spatio-temporal conditions, which determine the way worldview-shaping mythologemes emerge.
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