Siberian Federal University

Issue

Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences. 2014 7 (10)

Authors

Anisimov, Kirill V.

Contact information

Anisimov, Kirill V.:Siberian Federal University 79 Svobodny, Krasnoyarsk, 660041, Russia; E-mail:

Keywords

P.I. Nebolsin; nationalism; travelogue; literarity; motif; intertextuality

Abstract

The article investigates the role of intertextual borrowings in the poetics of the mid-19th century Eastern travelogues, a sub-genre which had been vigorously cultivated by many authors involved in the basic strategy of Russian nationalistic discourse to present the multiple and diverse imperial territories as an integral and homogenous space. A number of obstacles on the way of this approach were created by the popular imaginative perception of vast Siberian peripheries as faraway lands, a distant and almost surreal world, exotic from both social and ethnographic points of view. In terms of poetics and semiotics, the primary objective of the author was to describe the "unknown" as "known" and "remote" as "close". Within the studied period, the feature of "recognition strategy" typical of travelogues as a genre (correlating them with topoi of classical Greek and Roman geographies) attained a distinct literary aspect. As an example the article analyzes "Notes on the Way from St.-Petersburg to Barnaul" by Pavel Nebolsin, published in 1849. Describing the everyday life of Siberians, Nebolsin introduced a number of intertextual allusions taken from oeuvres by Karamzin, Pushkin and Gogol. Eventually, the reader was offered to recognize Siberia more as "literature" rather than "geography". The forming Russian tradition of literary classics became a poetic tool of "imagining" the Eastern periphery as the continuation of the whole national world.

Pages

1682-1689

Paper at repository of SibFU

https://elib.sfu-kras.ru/handle/2311/13387

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).