"Khozhenie to the Russian Land": The image of Kherson Province in Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) and in Alexander Schmidt's Materials for the Geography and Statistics of Russia: Kherson Province (1863)
This article explores the construction of the artistic and essayistic image of Kherson Province in Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) and in Alexander Schmidt's Materials for the Geography and Statistics ofRussia: Kherson Province (1863). In Gogol's narrative, Kherson Province emerges as a travestied 'paradise' space, conveyed through corresponding linguistic representations. Schmidt, through derivational sequences, outlines the mechanism by which the everyday space of the Kherson steppes - or the wild steppe - transforms into a non-hostile territory, a process dominated by the movement "towards a civil order." The use by both Gogol and Schmidt of individually "edited" versions of the Old Russian genre of khozhenie (a walking, or pilgrimage narrative) allows the authors to reconstruct the image of Southern Russia. They portray its genesis as a component of "Holy Russia" - the inner form of the language that constitutes a thinking personality of the Russian Empire. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.
Keywords
"khozhenie" (pilgrimage), Nikolay V. Gogol, Dead Souls, Alexander Schmidt, Kherson Province, semantic derivation, derivational sequences, predicative categorization of nation mental space, place image, imagologyAuthors
| Name | Organization | |
| Ilinykh Alina V. | Altai State University | rouze18@mail.ru |
| Khalina Nataliya V. | Altai State University | nkhalina@yandex.ru |
| Chukanova Tatiana V. | Altai State University | chukanova.64@mail.ru |
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Materials for the Geography and Statistics of Russia: Kherson Province (1863) | Imagologiya i komparativistika – Imagology and Comparative Studies. 2025. № 24. DOI: 10.17223/24099554/24/8" width="275" height="355"/>
"Khozhenie to the Russian Land": The image of Kherson Province in Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) and in Alexander Schmidt's Materials for the Geography and Statistics of Russia: Kherson Province (1863) | Imagologiya i komparativistika – Imagology and Comparative Studies. 2025. № 24. DOI: 10.17223/24099554/24/8
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