Ten Days on Bosphorus": Travelogues of Russkiy vestnik as a social and ideological project

The article deals with travelogues of Russkiy Vestnik [The Russian Messenger] (18601880) as components of a global ideological project of the edition. Despite the well-established reputation of a conservative (even ultra-conservative) edition, Russkiy Vestnik, like most periodicals, offered the readers travelogues on various topics. For example, travelogues of the "Asian" topic considered ideological modelling of the "alien" space, implemented through the artificial appropriation of other peoples' realities, their inclusion in the integral national picture of the world. The overview concludes with an analysis of the feuilleton text "Ten Days on Bosphorus" in which, through fiction (play with the reader, saturation with allusions), the ideological task was also solved. Examples given in the article, as well as the analysis of the feuilleton, show a variety of pragmatic attitudes implemented by the Russian travelogue of the thick magazine. As is known, travelogues were often elements of circulation products that repeatedly reproduced what was once said and described (including direct borrowings from guidebooks) and were an approved tool of ideological influence of the editorial board that determined the reader's worldview, "filled in" the empty spaces, the unexpected gaps in thick magazines. Nevertheless, completely different in quality, set together they allow to more accurately reconstruct the social and ideological tasks the editionhad to solve. Obviously, giving the reader the possibility of social development of space and modelling it through stereotypes and universals, the author of the travelogue could move from the social and empirical design to the ideological one at any time. In this case, the development of space was inevitably followed by its appropriation built on ideological coordinates. At the same time, the travelogues of Russkiy Vestnik intensively interact with other genres of fiction and journalism, the result of which is both the change in the contours of the periphery and the transformation of the genre core. This may determine the research optics which allows to treat travelogues in terms of their poetics (as artistic texts), their narrative (as utterances in the broad sense of the word) and their pragmatics (as elements of journalistic discourse), and to demarcate between the apical or classical samples of travel prose (from Karamzin to Goncharov) and peripheral products, often differing in topicality, but useless in terms of aesthetic tasks. Thus, essays, letters, travel notes - the various genre forms representing the event of the trip - certainly made the reader a partaker of the world chronicle, synchronising the biographical time with the fundamental historical one in their own way. The foregoing allows to consider travelogues primarily as elements of a social and ideological project, in the implementation of which the problems of aesthetics was a secondary task, giving way to pragmatics, which, in essence, gives the discussed travelogues of Russkiy Vestnik a common ground with the journalism of the period under study.

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