Travel Sketches Research Articles

Artillery in the khanates of Central Asia in the 18th — early 20th centuries according to memoir sources and travel sketches

The article is devoted to the formation of artillery in the khanates of Central Asia in the period of the middle of the 18th – early 20th centuries. The references to cannons and the development of artillery and auxiliary industries in the Khiva and Kokand khanates, as well as in the Emirate of Bukhara, according to written sources from the since the beginning of the 18th century, have been studied. The memoirs of officers of the Russian Empire about the use of artillery in the armies of the khanates of Central Asia are analyzed.

Islamic Heritage in Russian Turkestan as Seen by the Imperial Muslim Offi cial (Based on the “Tourist’s Notes” by Sh. Ibragimov)

The article analyzes the unfi nished and unpublished work “Travel Sketches. ‘Tourist’s Notes’” by Shakhimardan M. Ibragimov kept at the Archives of the Orientalists of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, RAS (St. Petersburg, Russia). The text refl ects the results of Ibragimov’s trip to the Russian Turkestan during the performance of his offi cial duties and his observations on the daily life of the local population. Being a Turk and a Muslim, Ibragimov paid much attention to the objects of Muslim historical heritage in Turkestan, the state of Islamic institutions (mosques, madrasahs, rabats) and the status of representatives of the clergy (khojas, faqihs), etc. At the same time, he sometimes critically examined the information he received about the local antiquities and even questioned the Muslim origin of some historical monuments and folk customs. According to the authors, this position of Ibragimov can be explained by the fact that he was not only a Muslim, but also an offi cial in the service of the Russian Empire. Perhaps he also took into account the preferences of potential readers of his “Notes”. At the same time, there is no reason to believe that Ibragimov was skeptical about Islam — on the contrary, his interest in historical monuments and religious sites, as well as a number of circumstances of his life and career indicate the opposite. The analyzed “Notes” are of considerable interest as a source on the history, ethnography and religious life of Turkestan. They also refl ect the level of development of Russian Oriental studies in Turkestan in the second half of the 19th century, combining elements of a travelogue and a research.

Уфа в записках и исследованиях зарубежных и отечественных авторов различных эпох: особенности описания

The article analyzes and characterizes the main features of the description of the capital of the modern Republic of Bashkortostan — Ufa city — in travel notes, notes and historical studies of domestic and foreign authors of the XVIII–XXI centuries. On the eve of a significant event — the 450th anniversary of the Ufa city, which will be celebrate in 2024, on the basis of a detailed study of Russian-language texts published in various historical periods, as well as publications published in several European languages, translated by the authors of the article, specific features of the description of a large Russian city are identified and formulated. A comparative analysis of travel sketches and descriptions relating to the corresponding periods of Ufa's development, including those cited in historical studies by foreign authors, has been carried out.

A Travel Book by an Artist-Pensioner: The Russian Artistic Community in Italy and the Disadvantages of Academic Education

The article is devoted to an album of drawings by an unknown Russian artist-pensioner of the mid-1850s from the circle of A.P. Bogolyubov. The young draughtsman, who had an excellent academic education, traveled around Italy, drawing typical views and genre scenes, while to a greater extent trying on the role of S. Shchedrin and K. Bryullov in his search for creative identity. The album is set within the broad context of the work in Italy of young Russian artists. Similar stylistic and iconographic analogies are drawn from similar sources — the travel sketches of A.P.Bogolubov and F.A. Bronnikov, as well as the album of F.A. Klages. A careful comparison of the works by the novice masters allows us to draw conclusions about the common problems experienced by the young graduates of the Imperial Academy of Arts who had excellent technical skills and, at the same time, a poor readiness for individual artistic exploration. The drawings examined in the article significantly expand the circle of visual sources on the Russian artistic community in Italy. In some cases there are portraits and caricature, as well as the development of the iconography of typical scenes (for example, “Interrupted rendezvous” by Karl Bryullov or “Temptation” by N. Shilder). The album contains many inscriptions, which are also published alongside to facilitate the identification of the author by subsequent researchers.

Книга очерков И. А. Бунина "Храм Солнца": История текста

The starting point for the authors is the notion of flexibility and dynamism of Bunin’s text, which was treated by this writer as a narrative that almost never could reach its conclusion, be verified and, since that moment, given an unchangeable version. The travel poems The Temple of the Sun provide one of the instances of that kind of treatment. The uniqueness of the material derives from the following factor – efforts initiated in the 1910s to edit the travelogue were the first experience, unprecedented for Bunin, in dealing with a large form, a prevenient step towards his later and latest works, such as Cursed Days, The Life of Arseniev, The Liberation of Tolstoy, Dark Avenues and Memoirs. For the first time in science, the authors undertake a fullscale reconstruction of the travel poems’ textual history, which became a significant step on the way to complete an academic collection of Bunin’s works that is currently prepared by a team of scholars at the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The conceptual center of all observations in the article is an emphasis onto the primarily “semantic” character of Bunin’s amendments – loaded with sense and paving the way towards the new poetics. The authors have found four versions of The Temple of the Sun: (1) initial publications of 1907–1911, which for the first time became an entity of “travel poems” within Bunin’s collected works of 1915; (2) the 1917 edition in which travel sketches were intertwined with oriental verses; (3) the thoroughly revised Paris 1931 edition entitled The Shadow of a Bird; (4) the “Nobel prize” version within collected works issued by Petropolis, a publishing house in Berlin, again under the title The Temple of the Sun. The authors analyze the texts that belong to this outlined circle of sources in the perspective of several topographic locations that concentrate around themselves the main motifs of the travelogue. They also single out a number of essential types of correction Bunin made in his opus. Motifs representing the cosmopolitism of world capitals (remarkably, not Western ones but Eastern, such as Constantinople and Alexandria) alongside with the specific sentiment in the narrator’s voice, marked with the feeling of the all-world unity, serve as indicators of the primal, most archaic layer of the text. Its history reveals how gradually (vigorously in émigré years) Bunin tended to reject both the world capitals’ narrative and hopes for a cosmopolitan future of humanity. These shifts encouraged an alteration of Bunin’s oriental poetics as a whole. Now traces of modernity are excluded from East’s images whereas the feeling of antiquity as a kind of a channel that could bring the reader back into the humanity’s past was, on the contrary, reinforced as years went by. A less conspicuous but not less important type of correction was based on erasing from the text the traces of the narrator who sometimes presented himself as a historically authentic figure: his “literary” citations as well as a “bookish” instrumentation of the telling subject in general were radically reduced and sometimes eliminated. All of this finally contributed to a virtual, fictional relocation of this subject out of factual realities of the 1907 travel into timelessness, from history into metahistory. All these strategies of revising the text that the authors singled out are considered in close connection with the real topography of Bunin’s journeys across Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Palestine, and Judaea. In the course of the comparison of the texts that refer to different stages in the travelogue’s history, the dynamics of initial aesthetic and ideological concepts that Bunin applied towards such centres of ancient religions and cultures as Constantinople, Athens, Alexandria, Cairo, Jerusalem becomes more noticeable.

유추강(庾秋岡)의 야담과 그 계몽적 성격

As a person who contributed to the prevalence of yadams in the 1930s, historical storyteller Yu Chu-Gang is indispensable. Yu Chu-Gang''s real name is Yu Seok-Woo. He was originally a minister, but in the 1930s, he began his career as a historical storyteller by narrating in the radio talk show. His orally narrated yadam and yadam telling contest, were warmly welcomed by the public. The Yuchugang''s yadams I confirmed include several articles included in newspapers and magazines, and the collection of yadams published in the early 1950s, 『O-Seong and Han-Eum』, 『Bong-Yi Kim Seondal』, 『Prince Yang-Nyeong''s Travel Sketches』, 『The Disturbance of Goblins』, and 『Jeong Su-Dong and Jeong Man-Seo』. He not only took materials from previous literature, but also compiled anecdotes of people that were talked about among people into full-length yadam. Yu Chu-Gang''s yadams have a marked enlightening tendency. He inspired pride in the nation through the bravery of historical figures and the will to overcome the national crisis. In addition, he refined customs by raising questions about convention and suggesting scientific and reasonable solutions. Furthermore, he preached the teachings of Christ to love his enemies and neighbors and emphasized the practice of love. Yu Chu-Gang''s enlightening yadam spread the history of the nation to the public and foster a modern consciousness. However, due to its enlightening characteristic could not escape the limits of diminishing the fun of the unfolding story.

Travel Sketches: “A Tourist’s Notes” by Sh.M. Ibragimov as a Source on the History and Geography of the Turkestan Region

The article presents the characteristic of the unfinished and unpublished work Travel Sketches: A Tourists Notes by Sh.M. Ibragimov (18411891), housed at the Archives of the Orientalists of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Ф. 33. Оп. 1. Ед. хр. 225). The authors attempt to show the value of A Tourists Notes as a source on the history, historical geography and ethnography of the Turkestan Region. The text of the Notes also contains information about some aspects of Russian politics in Central Asia and its perception by the local population. It was prepared by a very competent, well-educated and very observant author, a member of the Russian imperial administration in Turkestan. At the same time, due to his ethnic background and religious affiliation, the author was close to the local population. The article describes Sh.M. Ibragimov as a statesman and Orientalist, analyzes his role in the history of Russian Turkestan and Russias relations with the Islamic world in general, as well as his contribution to the Russian Oriental studies.

Поэзия и проза в книге И. А. Бунина «Храм Солнца»

Drawing on the contents of Bunin’s book of poems and travel sketches, The Temple of the Sun (1917), this article analyses the relationship and mutual influence of poetry and prose in his writing. At the upper level, it is a matter of direct textual repetitions and visual parallels in the registers of prose and poetry in Bunin’s presentation of identical impressions he received during his journeys through the Middle East. At the same time, particular attention is paid to the functional retargetting of artistic techniques: to the «prosaic» nature of Bunin’s lyrics and his adoption in prose of methods of expressing the author’s attitude and of describing things that are traditionally associated with poetry. This mutual penetration of the poetic and prosaic domains is explained by the special features of Bunin’s personal outlook, according to which all verbal creativity had its source in the element of life he regarded as poetic.

Русофония постсоветского травелога: медиальная поэтика Петра Вайля и Александра Гениса

The article examines aspects of mediality in the relationship between Russophonia and travelogues in the works of the contemporary Russophone writers Alexander Genis and Peter Vail. Both emigrated from the Soviet Union to the US and have been active in various media, including radio and television, not only literature. Both leave postmodernity and the notion of a national language and culture behind. Instead, their travel sketches explore aesthetic as well as entertaining formats, continuing the dialogue with literature but also merging it with other media. Their primary reference system for the Russian language provides stability with intermedial and plurimedial effects. “Mediality” denotes the interplay of several media in the communication process with the audience.First, the article looks at their co-authored book Amerikana (1991), in which they describe American everyday culture by way of a subtle comparison to Soviet life. Next, it examines Vail’s Slovo v puti (2010), focusing on his intertextual sketch “Armenia,” which reproduces the idea of eclectic time layers. Finally, the analysis shifts to the phenomenology of slow movement through cities, villages and nature in Genis’s Strannik (2011).Genis’s and Vail’s travel sketches connect the US, Europe and Russia, and also their different medial perceptions of the 20th and 21st centuries. They preserve the Russian language as a reliable lingua franca used by émigrés of all nationalities from the former Soviet Union. By suggesting an anachronistic subject determined by biography, history, hedonism and desire for knowledge, documentary literature departs from the post-Soviet aphasia (S. Oushakine), which described society after the shockwaves around 1991. Digital formats seem ideal for a globally interactive Russophonia as well as for the highly intermedial genre of autobiographical travelogue. Nevertheless, both authors avoid digital media.

Following in the Footsteps of Isabella Bird?

Alma Karlin (1889–1950), a round-the-world traveller, intellectual, and writer from Celje, Slovenia, arrived in Japan and lived in Tokyo in the early 1920s, an era which historians consider to be an interim period between the initial expansion of the Japanese Empire to mainland Asia and its end in 1945. The writer’s fascination with the land can be inferred, among other things, from a 35-page description of Japan and the Japanese in her most famous book, Einsame Weltreise. Die Tragödie einer Frau (The Odyssey of a Lonely Woman), and passages in Reiseskizzen (Travel Sketches), an earlier work. The article aims to place these travel accounts in the historical and ideological contexts of their time while highlighting some similarities and differences between the representations of the land and its people by Karlin and those by Isabella Bird (1831–1904). Although Karlin makes no explicit reference to the famous British traveller in her writing on Japan, the article demonstrates that she must have known about Bird’s book Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. It is, above all, her decision to introduce her (German) readers to topoi that were typical of Victorian women’s travel writing which suggests that Karlin partly based her image of Japan, if not even the itinerary of her journey there, on Bird’s bestselling work. Nevertheless, Karlin does not seem to have conformed to the then dominant orientalist discourses on Japan, her representations generally showing none of the Western arrogance that was so typical of her fellow travellers of both sexes.

EARLY ATHOS AND SINAI ENGRAVINGS AND THEIR ICONOGRAPHIC SOURCES: ICONS, PROSKYNETARIONS, GEOGRAPHICAL MAPS

A comprehensive study and understanding of Greek religious engravings require identifying iconographic sources and understanding the masters’ choice of certain works. Which in turn reveals the purpose and history of the existence of Greek engravings. Icons were often the subjects of religious engravings. Therefore, such engravings have a second name, “icons on paper”; along with them, views of monasteries and holy places were depicted. There is a separate genre in books, icons, religious paintings1 , cartography, and that is images with views of the Holy Places: Jerusalem, Sinai and others. In an icon, this manifested itself in the form of large panoramic polyptychs, resembling an “iconostasis with a view of the holy places”, especially in the 18th-19th centuries. This genre of proskynetarions appeared as a synthesis of geographical maps representing holy cities and areas (such maps have become widespread since the 16th century) and travel sketches of travellers - naturalist scientists, researchers of antiquity and, of course, pilgrims. It is essential to understand what place Greek Orthodox engravings occupy among all these monuments. This study helps to answer this question partially. Several monuments were identified from catalogues using the method of bibliographic heuristics: icons, early Greek engravings, works by icon painters, early geographical maps, illustrations of proskynetarions, picturesque panoramas of the Holy Land, which made up material for an overview iconographic analysis. It made it possible to prove that the monks ordering prints in European cities and producing Greek religious engravings on their own used absolutely all possible richness of subjects, art monuments different in genre and execution techniques. They created a new phenomenon - the engraving of the Greek world, which organically fitted into the context of the existing culture.

Middle Eastern Everyday Life in S.S. Kondurushkin’s Magazine Essays at Beginning of Twentieth Century

The problem of the presentation of the Middle Eastern everyday life in the early prose of S.S. Kondurushkin (1874—1919), an active participant in the literary and social life of Russia at the turn of the XIX—XX centuries is examined in the article. On the basis of the essay cycle “From Wanderings in Syria” and other works of the early 1900s, an analysis of the methods of recreating the Middle Eastern everyday life is presented. The narrative strategies that underlie the Middle Eastern narrative of the Russian traveler are studied. This makes it possible to clarify the characteristics of the genre of the travel sketch in the general context of Russian literature at the turn of the century, which determines the scientific novelty and relevance of the article. The authors examine in detail the essays “Greeks in Palestine and Syria”, “Terra incognita”, “La Bayadere”, “Akulina in Tripoli”. The consistent change of the exposing discourse of political journal-ism to various forms of “ethnographic” narrative are substantiated in the article. The tasks set required the use of traditional methods of academic literary criticism, as well as techniques of cultural linguistics, imagology, imperial and colonial studies. A number of archival materials are introduced into scientific circulation, in particular, letters from N.K. Mikhailovsky addressed to S.S.Kondurushkin.

War on Dirt: Aesthetics, Empire, and Infrastructure in the Low Nineteenth Century

AbstractThis essay considers the politico-aesthetics of infrastructure by focusing on poems that anticipate, justify, and critique internal improvements, from Joel Barlow’s early Republican vision of the Erie and Panama Canals to texts that document the ruin caused by the works Barlow imagined as glorious. Historical scholarship has long assessed the mania for cutting roads and canals into the landscape. But engaging an emerging infrastructuralism—and turning to imaginative texts that exist underneath the ground typically trod by US literary studies, from Philip Freneau’s celebratory ode to the Erie Canal to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ironic canal travel sketches to Margarita Engle’s recent historical verse-novel tallying the devastations of the Panama Canal—this essay identifies an infrastructural dialectic in which writers view infrastructure, initially, as awesome so as to justify its ecological and social violence and, subsequently, as banal so as to render it invisible within the settler state. Oscillating between awe and irritation, the sublime and the stuplime, then, these texts both expose the rhythm of infrastructure’s long—that is, low—relation to the structure of coloniality and, in Engle’s case, model how to disrupt it so as to imagine a more just life “after” infrastructure.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL LANDSCAPE OF A SMALL URAL TOWN: IMAGES OF THE IRBIT FAIR IN THE ESSAY ON THE 19TH CENTURY

The article is devoted to the key image of the historical and cultural landscape of Irbit — the Irbit fair. Based on the essays of the 19th century, three main trends in the depiction of the fair seasons of Irbit, which are dominant in different decades, are considered. In the economic essays by E. A. Verderevsky and A. G. Khitrov, the distinctive features of the Irbit Fair were first identified, and the topics of “trust” and “riddles” of the fair that were important for the trading community were declared. The second tendency of description, developing in the letters of E. A. Verderevsky and travel sketches of N. D. Teleshov developed the image of the fair season as a carnival, providing rich material for understanding the fair as a dystopia (M. Foucault), with special space-time relations, interconnection isolation and permeability. The third tendency of the image is found in the sketches of the Uralites D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak and K. D. Nosilov, aimed at improving public mores. In their texts, the fair becomes a kind of provocative landscape, both attracting and repulsive to the authors. Throughout its history, the Irbit Fair has retained its attractiveness for ethnographers, writers and folklorists as a representation of a wide range of social strata and ethnic groups. At the same time, there is no single narrative about the fair. By the end of the 19th century, the Ural literature focused on describing and exposing the spontaneous destructive forces that seize the community and the person during the days of the fair, while it was at this time that the local merchant class used the language of architecture to manifest their own collective identity. The growing gap reveals its adherence to principles during a radical rethinking of the historical and cultural heritage of Irbit in the 1920s-1930s. The article connects local “fair plots”, compares the views “from the outside” and “from the inside”, condenses the description of the regional literary context.

Nathaniel Hawthorne in Context, by Elbert, Monika M., editor.

<i>Nathaniel Hawthorne in Context</i>, by Elbert, Monika M., editor.

Death in Beijing

Alma Maximiliane Karlin (1889–1950) was a world traveller, writer, journalist, and collector from Slovenia. She embarked on an eight-year journey around the world in November 1919, in the course of which she published a series of travel sketches in the Cillier Zeitung, a local German-language newspaper. In one of these she reported on funerary rituals and mourning practices in China. After returning to Europe, she was to cover the same topic in her three‑volume travelogue, published between 1929 and 1933.&#x0D; In this paper we analyse these two early accounts of Chinese funerary rituals by Alma Karlin. We also consider some material objects linked to mortuary rites and ancestor worship that she brought back from her voyage in order to gain a broader understanding of her views on Chinese attitudes towards the dead. Supported by a close reading of material and textual sources on Chinese funeral practices, we compare her treatment of the subject with other accounts written by Slovenian missionaries to China in the early twentieth century. In addition to discussing certain personal elements in these accounts, we attempt to place them in their socio‑historical context.

UN VIAJE EN EL TIEMPO: EL POBLE ESPANYOL DE MONTJUÏC

The Poble Espanyol in Montjuïc is an enclosure where the architectural tradition of the towns of Spain is recreated through the appropriation of the typical elements of its architecture. It was built for the Universal Exhibition of Barcelona in 1929 and still survives as a distribution center for popular handicrafts, as well as a space for leisure and culture. To carry out the realization of the Poble’s project, a series of travels were made to Spain between 1927 and 1928, where hundreds of photographs, notes and travel sketches in notebooks were taken, which until today remain hidden. The main topic of the present investigation is the demonstration that the trips were essential in the final result of the project; without which it would have been very different. The travels gave the Poble a complexity to overcome the generalized schematization of analogous projects. To achieve our goal, the collection, classification and analysis of all the material that was collected during the travels, extracted from public and private funds, including the discovery of unpublished material: the travel notebooks, that allows us to deepen in the ‘making off’ of the Poble Espanyol, were made. Keywords: Architectural heritage, Universal Exhibition of Barcelona of 1929, urban scenario, travel notebooks.

«ФРАНЦУЗЬКІ ЛИСТИ» ІСМАЇЛА ҐАСПРИНСЬКОГО ЯК МАНДРІВНІ НАРИСИ

The author of the article, considering poly-genre basis of the “French Letters” by Crimean Tatar educator, public figure and writer Ismail Gasprynskiy, is focused on the analysis of genologic features of travel sketches in a text. A hero of the “French Letters”, Molla Abbas, is a protagonist of the author and represents the author’s own experience in his impressions from western life. In order to keep the reader’s interest at a high level, the author uses the principles of belle-lettres in descriptive material, and often uses such artistic technique as defamiliarization. The “French Letters” is a first book of travel sketches, in which the Turk Muslim’s view to a Christian-atheist Europe, especially France, is presented. A constant desire to compare the living conditions of the “native” East and civilized West as a need to separate among “alien” those things, which I. Gasprynskiy considers as absolutely necessary ones to introduce in motherland, is pointed out. First of all, it is an extensive system of education and researches, powerful industrial and financial development, social protection, competitive judicial system, wide participation of women in public life etc. In turn, the rationalistic West is opposed to the high moral values of Islam and the justice of the relationship between Muslims. Molla Abbas (and therefore I. Gasprynskiy) comes to the conclusion that the most promising way of development of Turk peoples and whole

The image of the great steppe according to the book of ibn battuta and the article of N.A. Nazarbayev “Uly dalanyn zheti kyry” (“seven facets of the great steppe”)

The topic of the present research is the specificity of Kazakh nomads, reflected in the article of N. Nazarbayev “Seven Facets of the Great Steppe” and in the book of Ibn Battuta, an Arab traveler.The value of the research is defined by the fact that the views of the authors of both works have found their full expression in the samples of oral poetic culture of the nomads of the XV-XVIII centuries. The purpose of this research is the systematization of the most essential features of the Kazakh nomads. These features are also described by the famous traveler. He reveals the uniqueness of history and culture of the nomads. The idea of uniqueness and originality of the nomadic civilization is the main message of «Seven Facets of the Great Steppe”, which raises “the question is not how to show its greatness by belittling the role of other peoples. Most importantly, calmly and objectively understand our role in the global history, relying on strict scientific facts” (Nazarbayev 2019).In the description of the nomadic country – Desht-I-Kipchak, Ibn Battuta appears as a subtle observer. Due to completeness, accuracy of historical description, we can compare his travel sketches with samples of nomadic poetry. This comparative methodology contributes to the achievement of the purpose of the research in line with the main directions – spiritual renewal, search for a national idea (disclosure code of the nation).

CREATIVITY OF WILHELM KIESEWETTER TRANSLATOR, ARTIST-ETHNOGRAF ON THE BASIS OF TRAVELING TO THE CRIMEA

The article deals with issues related to the work of the then outstanding Berlin translator, artist and ethnographer Wilhelm Kiesewetter. «The desire to present to the wider public a variety of looks, mores and customs of different, less known and less cultural tribes prompted me to study them during many years of travel and reliably display pictures of their life on the spot.” The result of his travels was a collection of ethnographic travel sketches, which consists of embossed images and canvases painted with oil paints. The article presents important elements of creativity of the traveler, translator, artist and ethnographer. The purpose of the article is to highlight some stages of his stay in the Crimea, to show an example of everyday scenes of children and teachers in school, to reveal his talent of knowledge of other worlds. Research methods: theoretical and historical analysis, synthesis of scientific literature. His philosophical reflection of reality is based on his experiences through the world of pictures and models of reality.