ARTISTIC IMAGE IN THE MAGICAL CRYSTAL OF MEMORY

The paper examines the relationship and repulsion of memory and imagination, the implementation of figurative memory in fiction and memoirs. Memory and imagination, while not being synonymous, reveal a semantic affinity. However, by pointing out the causal relationship between memory and image, researchers distinguish between the scopes of memory and imagination. In art, historical and cultural memory materializes through an archetypal set of values, ideas, expectations, stereotypes, myths, and so on. In turn, this allows to identify the cognitive content of mnemonic images, symbols, forms, and the specificity and unity of the sensory, irrational, and abstract elements of knowledge. Memory is interpreted primarily through metaphors and comparisons based on sustained collective reflection. Thanks to associative connections between fragments of the past and images perceived in the actual present, new semantic relations are built. Memory storage units acquire the status of semiotic things. Thus the image of the "mirror of memory", comparing memory with a magic crystal, a magic lantern, is not accidental. The metaphorical nature of photography also requires imagination and determines the relationship between the definition of "memory" - "imagination" - "image". This understanding of memory informs theoretical approaches and criteria underlying the analysis of a literary text, and also allows considering memory as a defining archetype of national culture, through which it correlates with fullness of the human universe.