The article is dedicated to representations of a French village of La Favière in the first-wave Russian émigré literature and painting. The objects of study include S. Chernyy’s poetry, A. Kuprin’s Gouron Headland and M. Tsvetaeva’s poems. Emphasis has also been placed on the epistolography, memoiristics and paintings of Russian emigrants visiting the village. Various Favière’s images are treated – by analogy with Toporov’s St. Petersburg text – as a Favière text: an integrated system of texts, created within a specific time frame and within the boundaries of the semiosphere, characterized by a high degree of consistency in terms of code, context and addressee, understandable to a specific population and containing a detailed baggage of meanings. The way in which Favière is presented as locus amoenus, makes the Favière text unique. In the system of local texts of Russian émigré literature, connected by the motif of foreignness as locus horribilis, Favière is a rare example of Arcadia found in exile.
The article is the first in a series of three articles devoted to the problem of defining the city centre in the local text of Narva (the first half of the 20th century). It proposes an original approach to the reconstruction of inhabitants’ perceptions of the city centre expressed in newspaper publications of that time. The approach implies the sequential solution of the following tasks: localisation of the city centre, geometrization of the city centre, identification of the functionality of the city’s central places and establishment of the connection between the ‘geometry’ of the centre and its functional content. The approach presented in the article is implemented to reconstruct the perceptions of Russian-speaking Narva residents of the 1920s about the centre of Narva. The sources of the reconstruction were six Russian-language newspapers published in Narva in 1923–1929. The analysis of the newspaper texts of the 1920s allowed identification of the range of streets and squares called central in the newspapers (Vyshgorodskaia / Suur street, Kirochnaia / Rahu street, Virskaia / Viru street, Rytsarskaia / Rüütli street, Westervalskaia / Vestervalli street, Gornaia / Mäe street, Pavlovskaia / Tuleviku street, Pochtamtskaia / Posti street, Ratushnaia / Raekoja square and Petrovskaia / Peetri square), and outlining the boundaries of the city centre, which generally coincided with the Südalinn district. However, as the analysis of the language of different newspaper article genres has shown, in the 1920s the central places in the newspapers included some places that went beyond the boundaries of the Südalinn district and belonged to the neighbouring Petrovsky forestadt; in particular, Petrovskaia / Peetri square. A comparison of the functionality of three central places – Vyshgorodskaia street, Ratushnaia square, which belonged to the Südalinn district, and Petrovskaya square (as part of the Petrovsky forestadt) – allowed us to identify the reasons for the expansion of inhabitants’ perceptions of the centre and the inclusion of Petrovskaya square in the notion of the city centre in the 1920s. The second article of this series will be devoted to the functionality and image of Vyshgorodskaia street as the main street of Narva in the 1920s; the third article of the series will consider two competing central squares – Ratushnaia square and Petrovskaia square, their significance in the life of the townspeople and the reputation of the places.
The article is the second in the series of articles devoted to the historical reconstruction of perceptions about the city centre in the local text of Narva in Russian-language printed media of the 1920s. Although printed media of the 1920s referred to the city centre as neither a particular point nor a line on a city map but as a large district, much of which coincided with the boundaries of the Südalinn administrative area, one street (Vyshgorodskaya st.) within this district was unequivocally regarded as the main one. Following the approach proposed in the first article of the series (Burdakova & Nõmm 2025), the second article attempts to answer the question of what functions Narva’s residents in the 1920s attributed to the city centre by analysing and defining objects and events held on Vyshgorodskaya street as they were mentioned in Russian-language newspaper texts of the 1920s. During those years, Vyshgorodskaya street was known for many various offices and businesses located there (over 140 in 32 buildings), which offered a wide range of services: cultural-educational, entertainment-related, financial, commercial, household, medical, legal, consular, informational, and more. It served as the city’s ceremonial thoroughfare, being a place for both religious and secular cultural events: Orthodox processions on church holidays and parades of participants in city festive events on the Independence Day of the Republic of Estonia (24 February), the Day of the Disabled (the day of collection of donations to the General Laidoner Disabled Fund), National Firemen’s Day, the days of school holidays to celebrate the end of the school year, etc., were held there. In printed media, the street acquires presentational, recreational, and socio-communicative functions in city life (a venue for bridal viewings, meetings, and the exchange of local news), and it is also regarded as an object of social scrutiny (journalists and residents closely monitored the state of its buildings, pavements, lighting and public conduct of city residents on Vyshgorodskaya street).
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