IMAGE OF SIBERIA AS RUSSIAN COLONIAL ORIENT IN IVAN GONCHAROV’S TRAVELOGUE THE FRIGATE PALLADA

Abstract

This article is devoted to the image of Siberia in the last chapters of Ivan Goncharov’s book the Frigate Pallada. The aim of the article is to reconstruct a comprehensive image of Siberia as an eastern colony of the Russian Empire in the Frigate Pallada. The Frigate Pallada text and the writer’s publicistic and epistolary heritage are the material for the study. The imagological and cultural approaches to the studied material are the methodological basis for this study. The specified aim and used methodology have determined the multidimensional scientific novelty of the study. We have obtained the following study results. Goncharov managed to create the comprehensive image of Siberia in the Frigate Pallada. The imagological approach to the material and G. Gachev’s concept of the national picture of the world expressed by the author’s threefold term Cosmo-Psycho-Logos are adequate to reconstruct the created writer’s image of Siberia. Goncharov contrasts the main features of the Siberian Cosmos (empty spaces and harsh climate) with the humane Siberian Psycho that is due to the harmonious coexistence of Russian settlers and indigenous Siberian ethnic groups. Siberian Logos also convincingly proves this harmonious coexistence depicted by the writer, in particular, the living interaction of the Russian language and the languages of the indigenous Siberian people. Today specialists actively research the us-them category interaction in modern imagology and in literary travelogues in particular. The writer’s comparisons with his own Russian realities are frequent in foreign Siberia. Goncharov’s approach particularity is to perceive foreign space in the light of his own space, this is his human and writer’s worldview. Thus, we have come to the following conclusions. The article demonstrates that Goncharov’s position (an adherent of the humanist ideas and an official, a secretary of the diplomatic expedition at the same time) has resulted in an idyllic positive image of the Siberian region as the eastern colony effectively mastered by the Russian Empire.