On formation of the travelogue as a literary genre in the 16th-17th centuries. D. Likhachev's subjective view of diplomatic reports

This article examines the emergence of the travelogue in the Russian literature as an example of evolution of diplomatic reports compiled by D. Likhachev and I. Chemodanov. The tradition of natural descriptions created during travels has existed throughout the Russian history. Medieval Russia mainly knew the stories of pilgrims, the so-called ''walking'', devoted to the description of the Christian journey to the holy places of the Orthodox Church, usually in Jerusalem, Palestine or Constantinople. Monastic vows of withdrawing from the world and asceticism were likely to prohibit mentioning temporal affairs, as well as personal experiences. The phenomenon of travel has a long history, which to a certain extent embraces our days; eventually the specifics of this process, which suggests moving from one cultural and natural area to another, remained essentially unchanged. Every travel was surrounded by a haze of mystery, and the place where the traveller found himself was perceived in two ways: on the one hand, it seemed dangerous and unknown for a stranger but, on the other hand, the traveller was tempted by the irresistible lure of discovering the new unexplored world attractive by its otherness and inaccessibility. It is considered that the Russian tradition of foreign travel dates back to Peter the Great, and the Great Embassy was regarded as the place where the first demonstrative collision of a large number of Russian people with Europe occurred. This article attempts to trace the act of cognition of the foreign reality by assigning it to the recipient through internal reflection. The image of Italy begins to take shape in the diplomatic reports, and its structure suggests a fundamental distinction between the categories ''domestic / foreign'' and "us / them''. In the course of travel, the act of cognition of the foreign reality is performed by means of internal reflection. The topos related to a different culture is adapted to the recipient in the light of native cultural traditions, cognition being an external phenomenon at this stage. Such a type of the narrative shows nominative perception of the world, in which natural phenomena are only referred to, in this case the word is identical to the object, and verbal relations between the subject and the object is absent. The formation of the topological image of Italy in diplomatic reports seems to be purely external, rather ekphrastic and descriptive, which is largely motivated by the lack of the traveller's background knowledge concerning the investigated topos. Thus, the 17th-century traveller describes what he saw with his own eyes, being a nominator, as it is seen from the type of narration. Thus, diplomatic reports are likely to reflect the transition to a new type of travel.

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