On the verge of life and death : control and ritualism in border situations (on the example of the memoir text notes of The blockade man by L.Ya. Ginzburg)

Statement of the problem. The paper deals with extreme situations, border situations, situations on the verge of human capabilities or even beyond them, presented in Notes of the Blockade Man by L.Y. Ginzburg. The purpose of the article is to describe ways of expressing methods of control, selfcontrol, maintenance of ritual and culturally normalized forms of behavior in the text of notes about the siege of Leningrad. Materials and Methods. The work continues the study started by A.V. Mikhaylov and T. V. Mikhaylova on the material of Notes by L.Ya. Ginzburg. The author grounds her research on the works of V.V. Kolesov about the theory and history of concepts in the Russian language. Works on the involvement by I.E. Kim, S.V. Uskova come into contact with the problems raised by the current research, as well as the works by R.O. Jacobson on the relations of the automatic, conscious and unconscious elements in a language, T.I. Steksova on semantics and categorization of involuntary realization, T.V. Bulygina and A.D. Shmelev on means of conceptualization of the world. The psycholinguistic experiments by A.V. Vdovichenko are also of interest. Results. The siege of Leningrad is described as a border situation in which the blockade man maintained control and ritualism in his behavior and speech. Conclusions. The study of human states, presented in the Notes by L. Ya. Ginzburg and similar texts, in the aspect of studying the role of ritualization of behavior, in relation to the explication in the text of the degree of reflexivity and controllability of actions, allows us to determine the possibility of correlation of elements of the system „human behavior - the text describing human behavior”.