Semiotics of the city in the sketches by N. Garin-Mikhailovsky «In the hustle and bustle of the provincial life»

This article attempts to analyze the semiotics of the urban space depicted by N. Garin-Mikhailovsky in «In the hustle and bustle of the provincial life» sketches. For this purpose, the main city locations, described by the author, are identified - the noble assembly, the governor's house, the apartments of the photographer and Abramson, Khlebnaya Square and some others. On the basis of the analysis, it is concluded that, when sketching a «portrait» of the city, Garin depicts it in almost the entire geographical extent - from the southwest to its northeastern outskirts; the intention to show «the whole» Samara in terms of the geographical extent is accompanied with a similar intention to show different social levels of the city life; urban locations are not depicted as static, remote and isolated objects, but as connected by a wide variety of connections and relationships. All this together allows us to consider the city, depicted in N. Garin-Mikhailovsky’s sketches, as a semiotic structure, a «complex meaning», and decoding is the only way to get closer to a real understanding of the formula in the title of the cycle – «In the hustle and bustle of the provincial life».