Judging “Things as They Really Are”: Dersu Uzala, A. S. Pushkin, L. N. Tolstoy, and Semiotics

Abstract

This article explores the artistic understanding and cultural imagination of a newly acquired region during its territorial integration. In V. K. Arsenyev’s case, this is the southern part of the Russian Far East. The focus is on the dualism characteristic of such historical experience — that of the traveler, symbolizing state power, and the local aborigine. One specific area of analysis is the poetics of communication: Arsenyev demonstrates that his characters speak, name, and think about objects differently. Examined from a semiotic perspective, Dersu Uzala’s communicative strategy reveals a predominance of indexical signs, which imply the interpretation of meaning through indirect signs and traces. The narrator’s expertise, gravitating toward symbolic signs, enabled the author to utilize narrative poetics resources such as metatext, intertext, and equivalence. The effect of the literary “invention” of the region is achieved through the referential linking of the described realities to recognizable artistic forms of 19th-century classics.