Medieval Russian Journeys and Modern Russian Travelogues: Temporal Corrections of Representative Practices

Abstract

La Topographie légendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte by M. Halbwachs was one of the first studies which employed the strategy of comparing “travelographic” descriptions tracing the dependence of descriptions of the physical world on predetermined settings. The author concludes that the geographical space of the “Promised Land” is realised through “legendary” images. The localisation of specific events occurs following the collective ideas of communities that transform physical reality based on models accepted within the communities. Thus, when we identify descriptive models, it is necessary to consider the constructive nature of spatial representations and correlate various rhetorical strategies used by the authors of travelographic descriptions. The article considers the possibility of using the comparative method when comparing the descriptive strategies of the authors of Russian Modern period travelogues. The author considers the role of images of the past in the descriptive strategies of eighteenth-century travellers. Referring to extensive material, the article traces the evolution of elements of space recorded by various authors, from itineraria (Ignatius Smolnyanin, Afanasy Nikitina, Trifon Korobeinikov, etc.) to fiction travelogues (A. F. Veltman, O. I. Senkovsky, V. A. Sologub, etc.). The author concludes that texts from the late eighteenth – first half of the nineteenth centuries reflect the loss of Christian values and the “crisis of objectivity”. One of the consequences was the crisis of travelographic descriptions and the fragmentation of images of reality, which is stated by members of the Baden school of Neo-Kantianism, who use the concept of “values” to create new research guidelines.