In the 18th century Paris fit into Russian culture, and above all into literature, as the topos with meaning and a halo of myth. This myth was specific – bipolar: the second – latent pole in it was Russia. The myth quickly identified two vectors of perception of Paris: as a feast, a territory of freedom, the center of culture and as “a new Babylon”, “the center of immorality”. The first – utopian vector, coming from Vasily Trediakovsky and Nikolay Karamzin, prevailed and became the leitmotif. But when Russian emigrants of the “first wave” found themselves in Paris, Russia as the ground shifted beneath their feet and their Parisian myth became ambivalent. The myth of Paris persisted in the USSR – discreetly. It burst to the surface in the post- Soviet era in the mass art form of cinema and again showed the utopian vector of perception of Paris.
myth of Paris; Russian culture of the XVIII–XXI centuries; utopian vector; ambivalent Paris of Russian emigrants of the first wave; Mayakovsky; Erenburg; post-Soviet cinema.