Camaraderie as the Cultural Code of the Cossacks: a hermeneutic Interpretation of Taras Bulba's Speech

Abstract

The article undertakes an interdisciplinary study of the speech about comradeship in N. V. Gogol's novel «Taras Bulba», combining the hermeneutic principles of F. Schleiermacher, the tools of social philosophy and linguistic and cultural analysis. The focus is on discursive ways of forming collective identity in the horizon of the social ontology of the Cossack world. The concept of «comradeship» is understood as a socio-philosophical category expressing an alternative type of sociality rooted in the ideas of spiritual unity and the organic integrity of the community. Taras Bulba's speech is considered not only as an artistic fragment, but also as a special discursive practice in which the archetypes of collective consciousness and the value foundations of traditional society crystallize. The application of an interdisciplinary perspective makes it possible to reveal the tense dialectic of the individual and the collective, thereby problematizing the binary opposition of personal and communicative ethics. It is shown that the rhetorical strategies of Gogol's text constitute a specific ontology of social connection, within which camaraderie appears not just as a form of interpersonal interaction, but as an existential way of being-in-community. The grammatical-psychological interpretation, taking into account historical and cultural distance, reveals the mechanisms of symbolic legitimization of collective values and socio-cultural norms, which are important for understanding the socio-anthropological aspects of identity and the processes of formation of the social imaginary.