The Ural mountains or the periodic table. On the subject and method of the history of Russian literature. Article 1

This article aims to analyse a number of historical and literary concepts related to the methodology of the history of Russian literature, particularly, V.N. Toporov’s theorem about “cycles” and “knots”, put forward in his theses to the report “To the question about cycles in the history of Russian literature”. Moreover, the article explore the perspectives and the applicability of A.N. Veselovsky’s historical poetics at the present stage of the literary studies development, as well as D.S. Likhachev’s concept of “theoretical history of literature” with his demand to abandon “empirical” historical and literary constructions. The author regards the theory of rotation a literary fact in the dynamics of the literary process system, developed by Yu.N. Tynyanov, Yu.M. Lotman’s concept of changing the textual meaning of a literary work at various stages of its existence, and some other concepts that affect the formation of literary history as the so-called “meta-plot”. The author considers the continuity between the Toporov’s hypothesis and the previous academic studies propelling the idea of a dichotomy of periods of stagnation and semantic-style “catastrophes” as a fundamental for the construction of literary historiography. The article actualizes the main issues related to historical narrative with the theme of the history of national literature: the possibility and necessity of such scientific descriptions, methods of periodization of the material, the principles of organizing the material related to the history of culture - the possibility of autonomous existence or involvement in it, as well as the extent and quality of such involvement.