Tomsk text: new strategies of «reading» and interpretation

Relevance. There are several circumstances that actualize the topic of today's study of the Tomsk text. The first one is that an adequate understanding of the specifics of the urban text and the city as a text ensures the growth of knowledge about the city, its development as an integral complex organism, a semiotically rich structure. The second circumstance is that the emerging meanings that are revealed with each new strategy of reading the urban text change our ideas about the uniqueness of local texts, their opposition to metropolitan texts. Methods. Thanks to the methods of structural semiotics, the comparative historical method, changes and shifts in the interpretation of urban texts are reconstructed, which are reflected in such properties of the Tomsk text as Siberianness, provinciality, sacredness. The hermeneutic methodology allowed us to consider the urban text as a communicative space that acquires properties and functions that have mnemonic, narrative, normative, and emotional load. Results. Humanitarian urban studies create a powerful methodological strategy for understanding the city as a text and make the request for an authentic space quite relevant. The meaning‐generating beginning of the Tomsk text is rooted in the so‐called creative natural landscape, unique wooden architecture that forms visual‐semiotic dominants; in a powerful mythological system that is being reconstructed to this day; in history, the events and characters of which enhance the uniqueness of the city as a semiosphere. Conclusions. The Tomsk text, as an open unfinished system, requires constant double reflection: on the one hand, the real space of the city is subject to comprehension; on the other hand, the increased attention of researchers should be focused on the visual‐semiotic image of the city, the transformations of which are natural and specially organized.