Genius loci and semiotics of the image of troy in P. Ackroyd’s novel “The fall of Troy”

Ackroyd’s novel “The Fall of Troy” is a multi-genre work, that combines myth and history, weaving in the unity of a character-figurative system of historically reliable, famous characters’ biographies with artistic, fictional images (H. Schliemann / H. Obermann). On the first place there is the history of the people, placed in the context of the world history. As in the novel “London”, in “The Fall of Troy” P. Ack-royd inextricably connects the biography of the main character with the biography of the oldest city, which fits into the history of the so-called urban mythology, creates a general cultural, historical, universal and at the same time national (main for the novel) spatiological projection. The conjugation of myth and reality determines the originality of the spatiopoetics of the work, in which the concept of “Genius loci” (genius of place) becomes important, defining not only the mythopoetics of the novel as a whole (Troy is the city of Zeus, Athens, Hector, Andromache), but also the originality of the loci included in it, associated with the legendary and real, ancient and fitting into the modern city of Troy. Troy is a legendary, glorified by Homer and at the same time a real city with precise geographical coordinates in Asia Minor, lost and rediscovered by H. Schliemann (Troy / Ilion / Hissarlyk). An important role in creating the image of Troy is played by the palimpseness of the city, associated with the history of its origin. In this connection, the historically developed multilevel, multilayered nature of Troy is emphasized. The originality of the urban mythology emerging in the novel is determined by the “Genius loci”, a concept that retains its original meaning and at the same time changes, becoming meaningful under the influence of a symbolic “complication” (elaboration) of the depicted urban reality, its “semiotization”. Consideration of the poetics of Ackroyd’s novel from this perspective determined the research task and content of the article, which presents Troy and her Genius loci as a semiotic, artistically capacious image with a characteristic postmodern interrelation of reality, myth and history.