The article examines the aesthetic coordinate of the Russian letter in the text of the national consciousness during the era of Peter the Great. This historical period was characterized by numerous reforms and cultural borrowings from the sphere of Western European civilization. The reception of external forms of Western culture, along with the text of semiotic and symbolic meanings, created conditions for the development of a new perspective on the essence of the national spiritual space, which had declared the religious-Christian value of the aesthetics of Eastern piety for a long historical period. The Russian written text, which asserted the religious image in the cultural consciousness of the people through the unified Church Slavonic semiotics, was subject to sacred de-aestheticization during the period of Peter the Great’s reforms – division into two culturally significant practical spheres: secular and religious. The aim of the study is to substantiate the assumption that the civil script, introduced into cultural use at the beginning of the 18th century, was one of the main structural elements in the formation of a new aesthetics in Russian literature. The scientific novelty of the work is due to the study of the aesthetic significance of the Church Slavonic and civil grapheme during the period of Peter the Great’s fundamental reforms. The results obtained demonstrate that in the early 18th century, on the basis of the introduction of the civil script, a prerequisite was formed for a theoretical approach to the substantive development of the space of Russian literature; the aesthetic expressiveness of new written texts based on the civil alphabet developed the category of beauty of the Russian word in the text of the national artistic consciousness.
Konstantin Vladimirovich Nikulushkin (Wed,) studied this question.