Abstract

The article analyzes the mechanisms of ontological failure in Gogol's "Petersburg Tales." The combination of Simondon's ontology with Lotman's semiotics allows for the proposal of concepts such as the onto-semiotic operator, autocommunicative collapse, and negative explosion. Gogol's text appears not so much as a satire but as a laboratory for the crisis of individuation. Here, the sign loses its connection with the body, and the boundary between the self and the other turns into an impenetrable barrier. For example, in "The Nose," social rank subjugates corporeality. "The Overcoat" illustrates how an object becomes a false operator, leaving behind the ghost of an unfinished transduction. "Nevsky Prospect" unfolds a space of permanent disparity, where the collision of codes does not generate meaning but only multiplies deception. Laughter ceases to serve a liberating function; it stagnates on the threshold between joy and horror. Such laughter fixes the failure of transduction and the loss of carnival release. The research strategy is based on the conjunction of two philosophical languages. Simondon's theory of individuation offers categories for describing pre-individual tensions, while Lotman's semiotics of boundaries allows tracking their semiotic fate. Instead of a harmonious synthesis, we place the concepts of transduction and explosion, disparity and autocommunication in the zone of "productive friction." This reveals an operational layer in Gogol's prose. The method is not reduced to illustrating ideas but extracts the mechanisms of failure or stasis of meaning from the text. Such an approach transforms literary material into an experimental platform for testing ontogenetic models. The approach proposed in the article is connected to digital reality. Algorithmic platforms and social networks reproduce the very mechanisms that Gogol described. The detachment of a profile from its living owner, the autonomous life of likes, and the collective collapse of communication in comments turn the Petersburg tales into not just a historical document but a functioning model. The onto-semiotic operator and negative explosion allow for the description of new forms of alienation and attempts to counteract them. They provide tools for analyzing how to return the sign to the body and transform the boundary from a wall back into a zone of productive exchange. In this perspective, Gogol emerges not only as a classic but also as a living participant in critical media theory. He acts as a co-author of an ontology that today seeks to understand digital platforms and algorithmic control.