Article

Name: Travel as a plot Russian memoirs of the XVIII century

Authors: Farafonova Oksana Anatolyevna

In the section Study of literature

Abstract: In the Russian memoirs of the 18th century the narratives of travels are rather common phenomena, which may be associated with a significant increase in the number of Russian citizens traveling in the post-Petrine era. The formation of the Russian literature of travel, as well as of memoirs prose, falls on the second half of the century. The memoirs, or to put it differently, the individual and personal narrative about their own way-voyage, is built, as the author of the paper believes, on the basis of certain stable components of the plot, of universal repeating patterns, worked out by the literary and cultural tradition. The retrospective narrative of a memoirs work supposes the existence of the main motive, which subjugates the entire narrative structure – the motive of recollection. From the viewpoint of the travelogue as such (documentary or literary), the object of a narration is the process of traveling (the way) proper, but coming to the forefront in the memorialistic narrative about traveling is the fact of the presence / movement of the author-hero in a different space and of experiencing this event by him. The travelogue as such is not an end of the memoir narrative in itself.

Keywords: memoirs, travel, plot situation, narrative, recollections

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