VALERII A. EFREMOV Сultural Memory and Precedent Phenomena: Fyodor Dostoevsky's Case

Abstract

The interdisciplinary phenomenon of cultural memory, which is relevant for a wide range of humanities, has not yet received an adequate method of linguistic research, although philologists and semeiologists (Jan Assman, A. Asman, Yuri Lotman and others) have developed a scholarly foundation for the research of this type of social memory. The author supposes that the main tool for the linguistic investigation of cultural memory is the theory of precedent phenomena, going back to the works of academician Yuri Karaulov and his followers. The article is based оn a theoretical description of modern concepts of cultural memory and precedents. It presents excerpts from the results of a linguo-sociological experiment conducted by a group of St. Petersburg philologists, the purpose of which is to analyze the intertextual thesaurus of Russian-speaking high school and university students. This article, presenting a small part of the experiment materials, gives an idea of what precedent phenomena from Dostoevsky’s works still persist in the linguistic consciousness of young Russians and what is the degree of preservation of the studied precedent phenomena. The experimental results are ambivalent: on the one hand, they reveal a good preservation of a number of precedent phenomena (first of all, those associated with the basic course of literature at high school: “Crime and Punishment”, Raskolnikov, “Whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right”). On the other hand, they convincingly prove the lack of formation of long-term memory about the deep content of the literary texts or the absence of individual and personal appropriation of Russian classical texts, which in some cases can lead to the quasi-precedence of certain fragments of cultural memory in the linguistic consciousness of a modern young Russian.

Keywords:

cultural memory, precedent phenomena, Dostoevsky, linguo-sociological experiment