Abstract: The article presents literary, sociological and cultural points of view on the problem of the literary canon, describes the mechanisms of canonization and defines the boundaries of the Russian classics. The author discovers a connection between the texts claiming the status of the canonical hierarchy and the question of ethnicity. The article establishes that the construction of both a national self-portrait and the image of a foreigner (the Other) are the most important functions of the classical canon. The object of this research is a unified discursive field of Russian classical literature. The subject is the generalized image of the German that forms in this field. The author, resorting references to current research practices of discourse analysis, establishes that the portrait of a German is based on such conceptual categories as: 1) the connection with the soil and nature, 2) the connection with roots, 3) reliance on reality and "mundanity", 4) planning, 5) positivism and subordination, 6) perception of life as a mechanism. The construction of the Other creates an opposition to the "Russian" in the structure of the classical text and builds a series of binary pairs: heredity / freedom, stability on the ground / ability to jump, clear planning / dreaminess, legalism / Paschality, self-aggrandizement / self-abasement, godlessness / Orthodoxy. The article reveals that the German hero acts as a constituent of the Other, provoking self-determination and self-identification.

Abstract: The object of the study is the recollections of Solovyov's game practices, depicted in the memoirs of A. Bely and M. A. Beketova. The subject is those mental ideas of the Younger generation of Russian Symbolists about philosophical ideas of V. Solovyov and positivist method, which served as a structure-forming element of such practices. The article constructs a general abstract model of Solovyov's slapsticks. It is revealed that it contains many signs, the signifieds of which are connected with the Young Symbolists' reflection on the ideas of V.S. Solovyov and positivism. By means of the structural-semiotic method the semantic fields and relations of these signs within the game structure are revealed. It is established that the semantic content of such signs in Solovyov's slapsticks is revealed as two different types of epistemology. The conclusion is made that in the worldview of Young Symbolists such types of cognition are opposed to each other. It is concluded that their opposition is the subject pivot of these game practices. The novelty of the research is connected with the fact that the attempt to describe the Young Symbolists' reflection on different types of cognition is carried out not on the material of the artistic and theoretical texts of S. Solovyov, A. Bely and A. Blok, but on the material of their everyday life. This position makes it possible not to dwell only on those layers of reflection which the poets themselves realized and expressed verbally, but also to bring into the research field their ideas which are not were not fully verbalized. The results of this study can then be used to reconstruct more comprehensively the worldview paradigm of the Younger generation of Russian Symbolists.