The poetics of space in the prose essays of Tobolsk Provincial Bulletin (1850s-1860s)

The newspaper essay exists at the intersection of documentary and fiction, and has special tools of aesthetic impact. Aesthetic possibilities of the essay were also realized by the Siberian writers of the 19th century. The literary topic of Siberia development takes place in the genre of the essay in the Tobolsk Provincial Bulletin newspaper. The documentary of the essays is manifested in a clear composition, a truthful and detailed presentation of historical facts. With all the documentary, the essays of Tobolsk Provincial Bulletin have an artistic component which is reflected in the tendency to typing, the author's fact interpretation and the imaginative perception of the native territory. N.A. Abramov's essays on the ethnographic descriptions of different areas of Tobolsk Province occupy the main place in the system of publications in Tobolsk Provincial Bulletin. It is Abramov who consistently draws the province's "face", presenting a detailed picture of the life in provincial cities and their environs. With an emphatic documentary, N.A. Abramov's stories have an artistic and journalistic character. Along with scientific texts, N.A. Abramov's essays contain a lot of local legends. Folk stories help one understand the region's history better, and the mythology of the place shows clearly in them. Landscape images of N.A. Abramov's newspaper essays are a means of mythologizing the province's space which is conceived as a place of despair and loneliness. In N.A. Abramov's physiological essays a connection is established between the geo-cultural objects and the symbolic figures of Russian history: Irtysh - Ermak, Berezov - A.D. Menshikov, Barabinskaya steppe - D.I. Chicherin. Using literary, artistic and folklore sources on a par with documents, reliance on the general opinion, appeal to the experience of the reader are vitally connected with the life of the region; they serve as the basis for creating the author's image of Siberia, Siberian artistic ideology of space. In N.A. Abramov's prose a cross-cutting theme is developed on not only the subdue of Siberia, but also its spiritual transformation, joining a vast territory in the history of Russia. The historicization of the space image is addressed to "his" reader and is aimed at the Siberian's self-consciousness formation. The artistic and journalistic image of Tobolsk Province and Siberia as a whole in Zavalishin's travel essays is polysemantic. In the traveler's perception, the Siberian region seems a solitary place, with mismanagement and ignorance, where every step meets the tyranny of bureaucrats, but the "other world" is a free, rich and patriarchal country and the guardian of the country's traditions. The mythological perception of space, associative links, inclusion of the semantic elements such as the sleep motif in the structure of the text, characters, dialogues, landscape descriptions of Zavalishin's travel essays have a fictional character. Despite the dominant nature of the documentary in the essays of Tobolsk Provincial Bulletin the artistic element in them shows in the figurative understanding of the facts and the mythological image formation of a Siberian province.

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