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The conceptualization of the geographical space is a systematic cultural innovation aimed at creating a new geographical picture of the world. Conceptualization is associated with a conscious desire to transform space by creating by creating ideologically and / or status-new places.

In the twentieth century, Russia and the countries of the Near Abroad experienced two waves of conceptualization of space – Soviet and post-Soviet. Different countries are distinguished by a different orientation and intensity of modern processes of “reconfiguration” of space. However, desovetisation (and in some cases, de-Russification) of space, with its active saturation with national and religious components, is characteristic of all.

The basic element of the conceptualization of space is a geoconcept: it represents a new, innovative, “name of a place”, which has connotative meanings that reflect a certain idea or reveal an associative image of a place.

There are two main mechanisms for conceptualizing space – renaming a place and raising the social status of a place (while maintaining the same geographical name). Therefore, we called this mechanism of conceptualization of space status sublimation of a toponym.

The types of geoconcepts (sacral, political-ideological, ethno-historical, ethno-cultural) are considered, each of which forms its own space and its network structure.

The cultural space of any country, region or city is an open book, a special text, the “reading” of which is an exciting and important professional occupation for a linguist, geographer, culturologist. Indeed, it holds, and for novice researchers withholds, deep layers of history and culture. At the same time, the history of a city or country, expressed in monuments and toponyms, always carries symbolic connotations. A monument commemorating the fallen soldiers of the Great Patriotic War, even if it does not possess high artistic merit, is a symbol of the victory of our people over the dark forces. Thus, the massive destruction of monuments to Soviet heroes in Eastern Europe means not only the erasure of an important layer of collective memory, but also – symbolically – the rehabilitation of Nazism. This work is devoted to the analysis of changes in the geocultural space during 2015–2020 in The Southern United States in relation to new interpretations of Confederate cultural heritage.

In the article the author examines the geoliterary aspects of “The Letters of a Russian Traveler” by N.M. Karamzin. This means that travel writing is seen as a way of literary exploration of space. Karamzin’s literary journey is characterized as a secular pilgrimage, in which holy places are replaced by cultural ones – natural, historical, cultural, and literary. The author changed the established vector of cultural assessments, considering Europe not as “paradise” and not as “hell”, but as a cultural space equal to Russia. “Notes” convincingly demonstrates that literary travel has a cyclical structure and a clear-cut spatial organization, which includes the linear space of roadside landscapes and the nuclear space of stops, which should be considered as an entrance to another culture. Important attributes of literary travel include a low speed of movement, which allows you to “read” the aesthetics and structure of the cultural roadside landscape, but also a low pace of the journey itself, which optimally combines stops and crossings, which allows you to harmonize the perception and images of new countries and localities.

In the article an attempt, based on the cultural and geographical approach, is made to critically comprehend the well-known poem by A.T. Tvardovsky “Beyond the Distance”. This approach considers the poem as a complex literary journey. According to S.Ya. Marshak, the author deliberately chose the form of a literary travel, which gave him a high degree of creative freedom. On the one hand, the hero makes a real trip along the Trans-Siberian railway — from Moscow to Vladivostok. On the other, the author’s thought makes a mental journey through the major — core — cultural regions of the country: Moscow — Volga — Ural — Siberia — Far East. The poet calls them “distances”. In this most important journey for Tvardovsky, he makes “long” poetic “stops”: separate chapters of the poem are dedicated to each region. This is the poet’s approach to literary travel: to think on the scale of a huge country. Therefore, each region is comprehended in the context of the Russian space, a spectrum of bright — national — geographical images was created for each region.

The course “Language and geographical space” is aimed at the study of modern dynamic linguistic and geographical situations associated with new political and cultural realities. At the same time, the approaches of cultural geography and critical toponymy are the main ones in the course. The key to the course is the problem of renaming geographical objects based on new ideologies and political attitudes. A comprehensive cultural and geographical approach considers renaming as an innovative and adaptive socio-cultural process. Mass renaming in cities leads to the replacement of one cultural and linguistic landscape with another, and widespread renaming of cities leads to the creation of a new geocultural space of the country. It is important to have an idea of the geographical picture of the world, which is solved on the basis of attracting various maps of the world; for linguists, familiarity with the possibilities of the cartographic method is useful. As a result, the course expands the scientific horizons and methodological arsenal of Master’s degree students.

The article discusses literary travels in the historical period of the Tang Dynasty, which entered the history of the country as a period of flourishing culture — science, painting, literature, and especially poetry. Two great Chinese poets Li Bo and Du Fu created during this period. Literary and cultural-geographical approaches to the study of travelogues developed in Western, Chinese and Russian literary geography are presented. The historical and cultural contexts of literary travels are discussed. The cultural and historical specificity of the travelogues of the Tang Dynasty period is that many of them were made not out of interest in learning new lands and cultures, but out of necessity. For the most part, the authors of travelogues were applicants for the position of an official who had to submit a literary work at the state exam. Routes, vehicles, stopping places and other elements of travel are analyzed. The role of literary travel in the development of literature of the period under consideration is discussed. Special attention is paid to the anisotropy, or the disparity of different directions, of the cultural space of China of this historical epoch. This is due to the historically low cultural status of Southern China compared to other regions. Travelogue materials reflect this cultural phenomenon well.

One of the cultural and geographical problems of literary landscape research is the definition of the very concept of landscape, which some authors reduce to a description of nature, “not noticing” the importance of its cultural component. 

Another theoretical problem stems from the first and is related to the understanding of the national landscape as a typically generalized image of native nature. At the same time, significant natural and cultural contrasts of a large country are not taken into account: it is not clear how to “generalize” forest and steppe, urban and rural, sea and river landscapes. 

One of the ways to solve the problem of the national landscape in literature is for the researcher to choose one of the regional landscapes of the geniuses of the place (Pushkin’s Mikhailovsky, Lermontov’s Tarkhans, Turgenevsky’s Spassky- Lutovinov or Meshchera Paustovsky) as a national landscape; but in this case, an important role is played not so much by the nature of the landscape as by the individual literary preferences of the researcher. 

Another objectified solution to the problem justifies the choice of a birch grove as a Russian national landscape.

M.Y. Lermontov’s poem “The Village”, published in 1841, presents two conceptually different geographical images — the image of a small Homeland (a picture-image) and the image of greater Russia (a map-image). However, a number of researchers of the poet’s work overlooked this distinction, assuming that the second image is merely a generalization of the first.

The article discusses the problem of figurative dichotomy, its origins and the fundamental difference between the two types of geographical images of the country conceived by the writer.

A picture-image, or a literary landscape, presupposes a vertical type of perception by the artist of the surrounding world (perception of a person standing on the ground). A literary landscape, unlike a painted landscape, is not a separate genre, although individual works of the so-called “nature lyrics” may have independent significance. An important spatial characteristic of the literary landscape is its pronounced locality: as a rule, it encompasses a range of several kilometers from the observer’s vantage point.

The map-image suggests a different type of perception of the surrounding world. This is an image of the world from above, from a bird’s-eye view. Therefore, this geographical image is bounded not by the limits of sight, but by the author’s thought.

While the landscape image represents the nearby world, the small homeland, the spatial image — or map-image — represents the vast expanse of greater Russia.

The article develops the concept of the image-map. It arises as a result of applying a spatial approach to the study of literary texts from a cultural and geographical perspective.

An image-map is a conceptual geographical image (of a country, region, or city) created by an author and capable of being visualized on a map.

An image-map is formed by looking at the world from above, from a bird’seye view, a view imagined by a writer or poet. Therefore, words such as bird, ethereal being, flight, sky, clouds, and mountains are characteristic indicators of this vision of the world.

The concept of a map image includes three levels: conceptual, literary, and geographical.

The conceptual component is expressed in the author’s spatial idea — geopolitical, geocultural, geohistorical. It forms the author’s vision of the described space.

The geographical component of the map-image is aimed at the cartographic visualization of the literary text, which allows us to better understand the spatial scope of the author’s thought and the geographical images of places that he has invented.

Literary texts that contain toponyms or ethnonyms as markers of space reflect geographical reality. Such “geographical” texts of literary works can be considered as a geographical supertext of literature.

Literary texts that contain map-images are associated with spatial or cartographic imagination. The spatial scope of map images is limited not by the author’s gaze, but by the author’s thoughts and imagination. Therefore, map images in literature are usually geographical images of the world, images of countries and regions.

This article examines map images of Russia and the Caucasus based on specific literary texts.