The intersemiotic space: Adrianopol in F. Dostoevsky's "Crime and punishment" St. Petersburg. The article focuses on the peculiarities of the intertextual space of culture and the means of its analysis. Level analysis, compositional analysis and chronotopical analysis are juxtaposed in the paper. Textual and intertextual chronotopical analyses are considered separately. Two aspects of textual processuality are juxtaposed: the history of text production and the role of the manuscript page structure as a reflection of the writer's style and mode of thinking (especially in the interserniotic relationship between picture, drawing andword); the history of text reception, its intersemiotic translation into different sign systems and its existence in culture in a scattered state. In this connection the notions of the individual and mental text are juxtaposed. As an example a page of F.Dostoevsky's notebook is taken, where an intricate combination of picture, calligraphy and text offers an interesting infonnation on the methods of formation of text conception.

Signifying practices by which living creatures communicate, are, according to Sebeok, the survival-machines. Accordingly, as represented by the semiotic text analysis or Bakhtin's textology, one can speak about a human survival-machine. This has been studied by different semiotic schools (including the Moscow-Tartu school) referring to language, culture, genre and, importantly, text ideology. In this article, the aspects of textology in Peirce's generalized theory of signs become analysed. After a discussion of the concept of text in Peirce's (published and unpublished) writings, its relationship with semiosis and other Peircean categories isshown. The project of elaborating Peirce-based text-semiotics expects that it must be dramatically different from other sign-theoretical text-theories. This may be a path towards more inter-subjective and creative textology.

Among the national scientific groups, it was the Prague Linguistic Circle that had the most decisive affinity to the work of the Moscow-Tartu school. This paper examines the work of one of the most tireless contemporary Czech interpreters of the Lutman school, Vladimir Macura (1945-1999), whose work on Czech literary and historical texts are outstanding examples of the reverberation of Lotmanian semiotics of culture in the Czech Republic. This is particularly the case in Macura's reevaluations of the texts of the Czech National Revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially in two books, Znamení zrodu (Signs of Birth) (1995) and Český sen (The Czech Dream) (1998). In these works Macura looked at this critical period in Czech national history as a multi-layered semiotic text in both the verbal and visual spheres. The present paper is an attempt at an exploration of Macura's treatment in this manner of the following: the Czech language, the city of Prague, the question of Czech national self-identification in general and as part of a larger category, the world of the Slavs. An important aspect of this project is an examination of Macura's exploration of the value functions of symbolic animals and plants in Czech Revival culture, and its relation to the axiology of Czech (Slavic) cultural identity. The paper is dedicated to Macura's memory.

From "word-images' to "chapter-shots: The irnagiuist montage of Anatolij Mariengof. The article discusses the three dominant imaginist principles of Anatolij Mariengofs (1897-1962) poetic technique, as they are translated into prose in his first fictional novel Cynics (1928). These principles include the "catalogue of images", a genre introduced by Vadim Shershenevich, i.e. poetry formed of nouns, which Mariengof makes use of in his longer imaginist poems. Another dominant imaginist principle, to which Mariengof referred in his theoretic articles and poetic texts, is similar to the creating of shocking images typical of Russian futurism. Mariengofs application is the juxtaposition of "pure" (chistyj) and "impure" (nechistyj), either a conflict between the vehicle and the object within a metaphor or a conflict between metaphors. This is an essential poetic feature in both Mariengofs poetry and prose. The third, maybe the most Mariengofian imaginist principle, relevant to the study of Cynics, is the poetics of transition (poetika sdviga), i.e. a certain fragmented structure of the text, which is related to Mariengors use of heteroaccentual rhyme. All these principles can be treated as fundamental elements in Mariengofs use of montage technique in his fictional prose.

On the definition of genre of Dostoevsky's works. The article mostly addresses Dostoevsk's own definitions of genres of his works, either explicated in the texts (subtitles, prefaces) or contained in the writer's letters; or rather the relationship between the scholarly strategies of defining genres and the writer's own view, as evidenced. by subtitles which, in some sense, are part of the text (in nearly, but not precisely, the same way as the titles themselves are). The writer's own definitions, then, can be regarded as possible objects of the scholarly interpretation. Agreement, or lack thereof, between the author's and the scholars' definitions may be due both to similarity vs dissimilarity between the definition standards inherent in the respective epochs and to specific interpretation aspects. In the latter case, agreement is more cornman in studies focusing on vastly different problems unrelated to genre, whereas disagreement is more frequent in studies concerned with the genres of Dostoevsky's works. One of the reasons why his own definitions must be critically revisited is that certain titles of his workscan be basically viewed as subtitles or genre definitions insofar as they in some way define the variety of the text regardless of the underlying criterion: narrative, "discourse", type of source, genre, or genre variety. Indeed, both these subtitles and, sometimes, the writer's own genre definitions tum out to be pretense, an imitation of "standard" subtitles or genre definitions, respectively. Titles themselves sometimes look like subtitles, thus "exposing the device" and demonstrating this mimicry not merely by violating semantic and syntactic relations in the case of subtitles (sign/name/title/ subtitle and virtual reference/"reality" of text - and relationships such as those between title and subtitle; title and the principal text; and subtitle and principal text), but also by the fact that their position is "marked". Dostoevsky not just failed to follow his own "final genre definitions" within the text, as reflected in the subtitles, and not just changed them repeatedly in his letters, but in the official documents, too, he sometimes defined genres in a way which did not agree with either the subtitles or his own definitions given in his letters.Dostoevsky frequently changed the genre definitions not merely during his work on a text, which would be only natural, and not merely many years after it had been completed, published, revised, and republished (which might be ascribed to memory errors), but also shortly after the completed manuscript had been shipped to the publishers or after the text had been published or republished. While the logic underlying these changes must be studied and interpreted, it is evident that the scholars are often unable to accept the author's own "final genre definitions" both because these are often unavailable in subtitles, and because of the "Proteic" nature of their use by the writer in various contexts.

Russian verse: Its metrics, versification systems, and prosody (Generative synopsis). In the article the general verse metre theory and its application to Russian verse is adressed, allowing us, thereby, to observe not the single details, but only the most general characteristics of verse. The treatment can be summarised in the five following points:1) the basis for the phenomenon of verse is its metrical code: the special feature of verse text is the presence of its metre (this feature is common to every verse type, to the most regular verse, as well as to vers libre);2) the nature of verse metre is extralinguistic, there is no metre within a language, the latter can only induce certain limitations in choosing a metre;3) metre is an abstract chain of translational symmetry, the elementary period of which is called verse foot (i.e. firstly, verse feet are contained in every versification system, incl. syllabic verse and free verse, and, secondly, verse feet can not be defined in terms of natural language, e.g., as the combination of short and long or accented and unaccented syllables).4) in verse text, metre appears through the medium of natural language: verse metre is coded in terms of natural language; the nature of its codification is detennined by the versification system. Hence, every verse metre can be realised in different versification systems, e.g. iambus can occur in syllabic-accentual, syllabic-quantitative, and some other versification systems;5) verse prosody is a consequence of the influence of verse metre on the prosodies of language; the range of transformation of a language system by verse metre extends from the unification of the strength of verse accents in accentual verse to such artificial formations as the origination of long syllables in languages which lack phonological quantity.

The paper examines V. Nabokov's "strange" novel ''Bend Sinister". The fictional space of the novel is regarded as a process of interaction of different languages or different versions of reality. The philosopher Krug's story unrolls in the imaginary totalitarian state whose ideology combines the elements of fascism, communism and the language of mass psychology. At this level the text is identical with a "social message". The protagonist has to choose between a "private autonomy" and a "bad solidarity". The paper offers the new facts and documents referring to the key symbols of the novel. The language of ''reality'' is deconstructed in the protagonist's idiosyncratical language, the language of his thoughts, recollections and dreams. Scientific metaphors are crucial in thedeconstruction and help to reveal metafictional nature of the text. The analogies with painting, relativist physics, logical paradoxes (Russell's and Gadel's theories) pemits to investigate the status of the fictional space, its development in time and the fiction of the Author.

The notion of intersemiosis suggests the game relationships between the multiple interacting signifying spheres of culture, but the term can also be fitly applied to the study of certain extraordinary artistic texts. This study makes use of one such book, Julio Cortazar's Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, to show how the sui generis interplay of the book's semantic spheres simultaneously models and renews the complex cultural processes of the production of meaning. This often reprinted and hard-tocategorize book that for years has remained at the outskirts of Latin American culture is also an ideal example to explore the dynamics between the center and periphery of culture as well as the writer's role in the creative renewal of cultural repertoires. By drawing a bridge over the apparent gap between the semiotics of culture and the semiotics of the artistic text, the present study attempts to approximate the critical-creative spirit of the late great theoretician Yurij Lutman.

I elaborated the concept of humanistic base texts when I was translating lndian and Chinese classical texts into Estonian. At present, I would classify as such the following works: "Bhagavadgītā", a part of Buddhist text's, "Lunyu" by Confucius and the Gospels according to Luke, Matthew and Mark, to mention only a few. This article gives a general survey of the concept, to be specified in the papers to follow.

This article compares the material pollution of life's elementary resources, i.e., water, soil, and air, with the semiotic pollution of the elementary resources of sign-processes, i.e., channel, sign-matter, and message; code, signifier, and signified; as well as context, sender, and recipient. It is claimed that semiotic pollution interferes with sign-processes as much as material pollution interferes with the fundamental processes of life; both types of pollution are similar in that they produce stress for human beings in current societies. It is argued that semiotics is able to provide the conceptual tools necessary to develop policies that can reduce semiotic pollution. As is shown, however, additional research is required to operationalize and metricize generalized concepts of semiotic pollutionsuch as "channel-related", "semiosis-related", and "situation-related noise".