DIALOGUE OF CULTURAL THESAURIES

Dialogue of cultures is a certain stadial form of their interaction. Distinctive features of this stage are globalization, the spread of multiculturalism. They bring together different cultural thesauri, which were previously at a safe distance from each other, disrupt identification processes and inevitably lead to conflict - "thesauri war". Hence the need (not abstract-philosophical, but practical, vital) to develop a strategy for overcoming this conflict, expressed in the formula "from the war of thesauri to the dialogue of thesauri."

Characteristic in this regard is the emergence in the 1980s in the United States of a new humanitarian discipline, called "intercultural communication". Its founder, Edward Hall, did not proceed from the philosophical ideas of M. Buber or M. M. Bakhtin, but solved a very specific task - to create an Institute for Service Abroad for the successful promotion of American values ​​and orders outside the country. E. Hall proceeded from the fact that the key to successful intercultural communication is intercultural learning, based on the practical use of the facts of intercultural communication of people arising from direct contact with carriers of other cultures. He understood the educational process as a process of analyzing specific examples of intercultural communication, as a result of which the intercultural competence of students expands and difficulties in everyday communication with people from another culture are overcome. A number of Western scientists (G. Collier, V. Gudikunst and R. Hammer, M. Page and J. Martin, M. Hule, M. Bennet and others) proposed models for organizing intercultural learning, among which the most famous are the Hoops and Bennett. Practical experience has shown that in addition to language, non-verbal information plays an important role in intercultural communication.

The emergence of intercultural communication as a special branch of knowledge is one example of concretizing the idea of ​​a dialogue of cultures, which is so relevant in the context of globalization and multiculturalism.

We also see another direction of scientific research in this direction - the study of the mutual reflection of the literatures of the world.

Mutual reflection will be considered a new philological, more broadly, culturological term for characterizing a special form of dialogue of cultures. Understanding such a dialogue through mutual reflections follows from the thesaurus approach in the humanities. The culture of one or another people, region, as well as an individual is described through the concept of "thesaurus" - a structured representation and general image of that part of the world culture that the subject can master, while the thesaurus is structured in such a way that in its center is "one's own", and on the periphery - "alien" and "alien", and on the border - a special membrane that passes any information from the outside through the prism of "own - alien - alien". Everything new, in order to take a certain place in the thesaurus, must be mastered to one degree or another (literally: made one's own). With this approach, mutual reflection in the most general form describes the situation of the meeting of two thesauri, the form that their dialogue acquires, the consequences of this dialogue.

This is a much broader view of the problem of literary interactions than the notion of literary influences developed within the framework of comparative studies or the notion of typological convergences developed within the framework of the typological approach, since it not only indicates the fact of contact influences or non-contact, historically conditioned similarities in world literature, but and reveals the mechanisms of these cultural phenomena. Mutual reflections indicate the degree of mutual understanding of different cultures.

Mutual reflections of different literatures of the world can be characterized only in the course of comprehending their specificity, which in each of the interacting cultural thesauri forms a membrane - a kind of barrier, in some ways easily overcome, in some ways requiring a restructuring of cultural information, and in some ways it is not at all. transmissive.

The dialogue of cultures, the mutual reflection of literatures as its concrete embodiment does not at all lead to the formation of some kind of averaged "global" literature. Dialogue remains dialogue, that is, the communication of independent entities without their merging; it makes sense in a situation where there is a danger of a violent merger, which gives rise to cultural conflict. The dialogue of cultures leads to an understanding of the other.