Article

Name: Idyllic image of Germany in Russian sentimentalism at the turn of the 19th century (based on N. M. Karamzin’s and F. P. Lubyanovskiy’s works)

Authors: S. S. Zhdanov

Siberian State University of Geosystems and Technologies, Novosibisrk, Russian Federation, Tomsk State University, Tomsk, Russian Federation

In the section Study of literature

Abstract: The author of the article studies an idyllic image of Germany represented in two travelogues of the turn of the XIX century. These are N. M. Karamzin’s «Russian Traveller’s Letters» and F. P. Lubyanovsky’s «Journey to Saxony, Austria and Italy in 1800, 1801 and 1802». Both works were written within a framework of the sentimentalist discourse. Karamzin’s «Russian Traveller’s Letters» have been studied well enough in the Russian literary criticism. However, Lubyanovsky’s work has been researched to a much lesser degree. Thus, the contrastive-comparative analysis of these opuses seems to be interesting and meaningful, given a doubtless influence of the Karamzin’s «Letters…» upon a multitude of further Russian travelogues. This literature of journey was closely related to a significant transformation which touched the Russian culture in the 18-19th centuries in connection with expanding relations with the West. Travelogues devoted to European journeys were in this context a convenient space for communication between the Own and the Alien and made a substantial contribution to the national self-identification process of Russian writers and their audience. Describing their European tours, Karamzin and Lubyanovsky did not confine themselves to reporting the factual information and comparing Russians with other European nations. Both authors added actively mythopoetic aspects in their texts by using idyllic, Arcadian topoi which were contaminated with presenting the ‘real’ Germany. Furthermore, special characteristics of describing the German nature should be emphasized. The sentimentalist travelers deal here with a gentrified and ‘civilized’ landscape. In the descriptions of Germany, they give accent to the anthropic influence morphing and quieting the wild nature. This motive is mostly shown in the locus of the park and the garden. Parks and gardens are described not only within cities but also out of them. The idyllic image of the garden-country estate can extend and contaminate with anthropic-urbanistic spaces what gives rise to images of the garden-city and the park-principality. The locus of the garden also includes the meaning of the return to the lost and newly found paradise, to the golden age of humanity. At the same time, the space of the German idyll in the Russian travelogues is ambivalent. The authors not only create the image of the renewed Arcadia but deconstruct it, showing how a ‘real’ world differs from a literary ideal. The temperance and the patriarchy change to the philistine narrowmindedness and indifference. Thus, the idyll is destroyed by the author’s irony.

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