Types of the socio-cultural landscape of Siberia in the mirror of the 19th-century travel prose

The article aims to study regional (Siberian) landscapes in the sociocultural aspect as products of the relationship between physical reality, social practices and reflections as mirrored in the travel prose of the 19th century. By socio-cultural landscape I mean a territorial system consisting of natural and anthropogenic components and complexes developing in interconnection. The main objective of the article is to adapt the concept of landscape that arose in geography to the tasks of its humanitarian research as an element of the physical world involved in the system of spiritual culture, as well as the systematization of cultural and linguistic landscapes of Siberia by typologization. This is necessary to streamline the many natural and cultural complexes of the region and in connection with the problems of identifying their individuality and preserving unique natural and cultural areas. The methodological basis for describing the types and types of socio-cultural landscapes of Siberia is Lohn Lipple's model, which assumes four levels of analysis: “physical substrate”, “regulatory systems”, “interactions and actions”, “symbolic coding and perception”. In addition, the focus is on two more characteristics of the cross-border Siberian landscape - multilayering (a combination of vertical and horizontal communications, the coexistence of state ties between the region and the metropolis, and naturally formed interethnic contacts of the population) and discreteness (the focal placement of the population, the presence of areas with different types of interaction, and the degree of identity preservation). Due to the large volume of the material, the problem posed is solved only based on texts related to travel secular prose, which largely determines the development of Siberian literature and literature of central Russia in the 19th century and is the most indicative of the topic of interest to me. The analysis showed that, as a rule, images of Siberian socio-cultural landscapes (naturally formed, purposefully formed, and associative) were created in the literature by describing natural objects or the natural environment as a whole, history, socio-cultural practices of the population, regulation of intercultural interaction, as well as the author's “symbolic coding” of the narrative. Most often, they are complex combinations of several types of kinds of landscape, the totality of which determines their individuality. Each type and kind I identified, taking into account the transborder nature of the socio-cultural landscape of Siberia as a whole, forms its own grids of markers, so that landscapes are identified from different positions and appear, on the one hand, distinctive, isolated, and, on the other, as a territorial system consisting of different interconnected types and kinds of landscape, and ensuring the stability and viability of the Siberian region. In addition, the considered material makes it possible to build a typology of Siberian socio-cultural landscapes on other grounds; therefore, it is possible to build other typologies, identify other types of landscape and markers that I have not named. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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