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Abstract:

The article examines the status and genre paradigm of the emigrant literary estate as a reconstruction of the Russian traditional one of the 19th – early 20th centuries, the term “estate” regarded in its widest sense and the corresponding phenomenon juxtaposed to that of the city in the aesthetic and ontological perspectives. The “estate paradigm” is presented in its dynamics conditioned by existential circumstances both in harmonic periods and in turbulent and chaotic times of social and historical catastrophes. The article is based on confessional texts, the object of analysis being the actual existential experience reflected in memoirs, diaries, and letters. The first part of the article is focused on the comparative description of the typological properties of the manor (functional, axiological, semiotic, etc.) as an antipode of the city; the characteristics of the house and ways of experiencing it proposed by G. Bashlyar are fundamental for this part. The second part reconstructs the estate stories of some emigrant writers.