Literature and geography: the Urals in Russia geopoetics

The article explores the impact of geographic factor on Russian self-consciousness and literature. This influence can be traced in literature - in geopoetics that shows the moment of interaction between the terrain and the cultural form which organizes it, and also in historiosophy - particularly in geopolitics that determines country's destiny according to its location and landscape. The work provides the analysis of axiologically diverse traditional concepts of Russian space - by P. Chaadayev, N. Gogol, I. Turgenev, N. Berdyaev etc. (based on the idea of stretch, expanse, limitlessness). A certain evolution of images of space is observed in 1990-2000-s when the collapse of the USSR brought about tendencies of regional self-determination. Against the background of all-Russian emblematics and symbolism literature of the Urals forms a new model of geographical space, whose dominant basis is not the flat limitlessness, but dark and inexhaustible subterranean depth (in the works of P. Bazhov, D. Mamin-Sibiryak, etc). In 1990-s and 2000-s the Ural geopoetical dominant addressing to the bowels of the earth was amplified with fundamentally distinctive accent - the prose of A. Ivanov (to the fullest extent and quality), O. Slavnikova, mass culture texts (on the example of S. Alekseev) form messianically and eschatologically tinged neo-mythology of the Urals. Regional geopoetics initiates geopolitical projections: the Urals is considered to be the successor to the Messianic idea in Russia.