Socio-cultural paradigm of the life of the non-metropolitan writers" Community

Statement of the problem. The research focuses on the specifics of the modern Siberian writers’ understanding of their place in the social and cultural space, the process and mechanisms of finding this place both in practical (everyday) and existential (existential) aspects. The purpose of the article is to consider the forms and methods of organizing writers’ communities in Irkutsk, discourses of self-presentations and their correlations with worldview and geography. Review of the scientific literature on the problem. Humanitarian studies of writers’ communities are few and limited both by certain chronological frames of the object under study (literary communities of the nineteenth century, the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries, the Soviet period) and methodology-wise. Modern writers’ associations, organizations specific both institutionally and ideologically, rarely fall into the prism of humanitarian studies. Methodology (materials and methods). The research is interdisciplinary, which determines the choice of its materials and methods: sociolinguistic (interviews and questionnaires, correlation analysis), discourse analysis, contextual analysis, and cognitive-discursive approach. This article is based on the materials of interviewing and surveying forty-five writers of Irkutsk and the Irkutsk region. Research results. Membership in a certain organization is used as symbolic capital due to the struggle of two discursive practices - explicit “traditionalist” and implicit “other” ones (not designated by its adherents, but, according to their opponents, “anti-traditionalist”). It is the institutional attachment, according to the conflicting parties, that determines the ways of interaction with the culturally significant concepts of “Writer’s Community”, “Reader”, “Russian Literature”, “Siberian Literature”, “Traditions”, and “Innovation”. In geographical and socio-cultural aspects, respondents, by an absolute majority, choose a “national” strategy of self-presentation, inscribing their creativity in the space of Russian literature, in such direction as realism. Conclusion. The analysis of the empirical material allows us to identify two main equivalent tools of self-actualization and self-presentation of the modern Irkutsk writer: 1. Institutional attachment to a particular writers’ community (the Union of Writers of Russia, the Union of Russian Writers, the representative office of the Union of Russian Writers, the Irkutsk Regional Writers’ Organization); 2. The concept of “Great Russian literature” and belonging to it.