Alexej Remizov is usually regarded by literary critics as a Symbolist rather than a Futurist writer. However, I would posit that Remizov similarly to the Futurists viewed language as “logos,” bozhestvennii glagol. According to the mystical interpretation of the famous words “At the beginning there was Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”, when God was creating the world he named the objects, and these abstract names became a force for the appearance of an object in physical reality. In the light of these words, The Medieval mystical and magical philosophers claimed that one could restore the divine language of Creation, possess the ability to create objects anew, and thereby become Creator himself. One can argue that a major goal of Remizov was similar to that of hisMedieval predecessors: to reveal the mystical power of language in order to create, not to describe reality. The paper analyzes three chapters from Alexej Remizov’s Rossiya v pis’menah, a book which can be read as a manifesto of Remizov’s attitude toward language and reality, and discuss possible sourcesthat might have influenced Remizov in his attitude towards language.

This article attempts to analyse Russian postmodernist poetics, proceeding from the concept of the “trans-semiotic stairs”, as presented by J. Faryno for describing the avant-garde. Examples from various texts are used to demonstrate how postmodernist texts contain divergent processes: the culturally specific and unique dissolves in tautology, meaningful entireties are dispersed into atomized empty particles. The significant teleological model of the avant-garde ceases to function here. A play by J. Brodsky, Marble, is examined on this background, as well as the position of the author that differs from the “postmodernist” context.

The paper is devoted to the problem of the linguistic grounds of the semiotic model of history, according to which history is described as a communication process circulating within a society. An analogy of principle between language and culture is the theoretical premise of that semiotic approach. Proceeding on this assumption semiotics (B. Uspensky’s case for instance) regards historical process as the process of text outcome and reading, while at the same time control over communication is provided through the cultural code or in other words — through the grammar of history. But the description of history as just the functioning of a single and unified grammatical code doesn’t make it possible to explain the appearance of new meanings or history par excellence. J. Lotman interpreted the rhetorical mechanism of text outcome as the working of two (at a minimum) interplaying semiotic systems. It is the principle of its working that he takes as abasis of his semiotic version of cultural diachrony. And at the very point semiotics finds itself in front of the choice: either to stop at the decomposition the rhetorical machine on separate cultural codes and at the description their separate grammars, or to conceptualize a historical event as un-grammatism, grammatical error, “wrong text”. The analytical way leads to an extremely reduced theoretical construction; the synthetic way undermines status of the semiotic model of history as a positivistic scientific project.

The present paper is devoted to the relation between changing historical identity of Russian Formalists in the second half of the 1920s and their individual evolution — as writers, members of society, figures of culture. Formalists with their aggressive inclination to modernity are opposed here to structuralists, the bearers of a conservative, traditional ideology (relating to the idea of Revolution). It could be explained by the specific “romantic” identity of Russian Formalists whose purpose was to appropriate cultural values renamed and renewed by their revolutionary theory. As a revolutionary ideology, formalism was imported from the West. But the Stalinist “Renaissance” made the idea of Revolution both in mind and society senseless at the end of the 1920s. That is why Russian Formalism lost its mainstream positions and began to work out a new, adapted form of intellectual resistance (private life, domestic literature) in the next decade.

At present the theory of Russian Formalism becomes actual once again owing to the rapid development of cognitive science. Aesthetic theories recently put forward within the framework of cognitive science turned out to be consonant with the Formalist’s views on the general principles of artistic activity. In my paper I argue that (1) the theory of Russian Formalism contains a number of methodological assumptions that are close to a cognitive approach; (2) some of the main principles of the Formalist theory (e.g., “elimination of automatism of perception” or “the dominant”) permit the reformulation into cognitive terms; (3) such reformulation is not only possible, but useful because it makes the theory more powerful for explanation of the artistic phenomena. The findings from the new field of cognitive science not only prove some Formalist theses, but deepen and specify them as well.

Diagnostics of a mental disorder completely bases on an estimation of patient’s behaviour, verbal behaviour being the most important. The behaviour, in turn, is ruled by a situation expressed as a system of signs. Perception of a situation could be seen as a function, which depends on the context resulting from the previous situations, structuring personal world. So the world is not given — it is being formed while the person is in action. We argue that distinctive features of behaviour, including its abnormal variants, can be explained not in categories of characters and diseases but in terms of situations taking place in individual worlds. The situation in which a person perceives himself is not simply a site in a three-dimensional space at a certain moment, but a part of the world and an episode of his life. Like a text composed of words, individual world is composed of situations. Each of them needs certain context to cope with ambiguity. This context is induced by the world as a whole. And the world, in turn, is presented as a chain of situations. If the context cannot help to interpret a situation adequately, uncertainty can be eliminated by actions clarifying a situation, which is changed in a predictable way. Thus, purposeful activity, skills to make predictions and corrections of one’s own actions are crucial. Weakness of any of them inevitably leads to the distortion of the presentation of the world, to wrongevaluation of situations and, as a result, to inadequate actions that finally reduce the activity as being ineffective. Thus, the lack of activity becomes the key factor in the development of disorder, being simultaneously its cause and effect. In periods of insufficient activity conditions for violated (and violating) sign processing arise. Possible variants of sign malfunction are: oligosemia (reduction of the number of perceivable signs), hyposemia (decrease of significance of signs), hypersemia (increase of significance of some signs at the expense of others), ambisemia (uncertainty of sign, when situation remains unclear), cryptosemia (recognition of signs not obvious for other observers), and parasemia (perverted interpretation of signs influenced by a false context).

In biosemiotics, life and living phenomena are described by means of originally anthropomorphic semiotic concepts. This can be justified if we can show that living systems as self-maintaining far from equilibrium systems create and update some kind of representation about the conditions of their self-maintenance. The point of view is the one of semiotic realism where signs and representations are considered as real and objective natural phenomena without any reference to the specifically human interpreter. It is argued that the most basic concept of representation must be forward looking and that both C. Peirce’s and J. v. Uexküll’s concepts of sign assume an unnecessarily complex semiotic agent. The simplest representative systems do not have phenomenal objects or Umwelten at all. Instead, the minimal concept of representation and the source of normativity that is needed in its interpretation can be based on M. Bickhard’s interactivism. The initial normativity or natural self-interest is based on the ‘utility-concept’ of function: anything that contributes to the maintenance of a far from equilibrium system is functional to that system — every self-maintaining far from equilibrium system has a minimal natural self-interest to serve that function, it is its existential precondition. Minimal interactive representation emerges when such systems become able to switch appropriately between two or more means ofmaintaining themselves. At the level of such representations, a potentiality to detect an error may develop although no objects of representation for the system are provided. Phenomenal objects emerge in systems that are more complex. If a system creates a set of ongoingly updated ’situation images’ and can detect temporal invariances in the updating process, these invariances constitute objects for the system itself. Within them, a representative system gets an Umwelt and becomes capable of experiencing triadic signs. The relation between representation and its object is either iconic or indexical at this level. Correspondingly as in Peirce’s semeiotic, symbolic signs appear as more developed — for the symbolic signs, a more complex system is needed.