Railway and railway station as urbanistic concepts in works of S. Zhadan

Abstract

The article is devoted to the important subject of modern cultural study – to the studying of meanings of the urban terms «railway» and «railway station» in fiction. The research is interdisciplinary, because it’s based on the idea of the death of author by famous literary critic and thorist roland barthes. Moreover, the article engages in discussion of the problem historians, philosophers and other humanities. Such approach allows overflow the traditional biographical analyze and interline the works of the author in wider context. The resources of the article are the fiction by famous ukrainian writer serhiy zhadan, which was written during last 25 years. For the analyze were used not only prose, but poems and even songs. Fiction by s. Zhadan was chosen for research because the narrative created by him can be called popular among the different groups of peoples, and then it can be called the depository of collective meanings.

Besides this, we need to stress, that in the article the research of the meanings articulated by author was analyzed not through his biography but through the general discourse, which – according to r. Barthes – is described in the fiction of writer. That is why the author’s narrative, which is conditioned by discourse, transformed into the vocabulary of common meanings of society, who create this discourse.

During the work on the article the next meanings of the concept «railway» was stressed: the point of the begin and the end, the place of transit, the special place as «the city in the city», the element, which changes urban place around it and gives it new associations. The «railway station» as a concept is understanding in literature as the process of travelling, it symbolized the moving and transferring states of subject (as individual, and as collective). The meanings which were find were comparable with the architectural view of the ukrainian railway stations and with this how the appearance of railway and railway station changed the urban logic of city. Due to this comparable the several practice ideas about the place of railway in urban space were found.