About the author
Olga R. Demidova, PhD in Philology, DSc in Philosophy, Full Professor, Leningrad State University after A.S. Pushkin, Peterburgskoe ave., 10, 196605 St. Petersburg, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2281-4059
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Abstract
The article is based on M.A. Osorgin’s memorial and autobiographical texts written in Russia and in emigration during the periods of historical catastrophes of 1917 — the 1940s, as well as on his letters to A.A. Poliakov written in 1940–1942, the last two years of his life, from the little French town Chabris in the so called «free zone» during the time of the Nazi occupation of France. The comparative semiotic and hermeneutic analysis undertaken in the article makes it possible to reconstruct the “estate” phenomenological paradigm and the evolution of the estate topos (from the estate per se to the villa, “small house”, dacha, peasant hut) in Osorgin’s life philosophy and writings based on his understanding of “the estate” as the “existential space” of escape from the outer to the inner world proved the only possible one in the periods of historical cataclysms.