The role of V.V. Izmailov's "Journey to Midday Russia" in the formation of the Novorossiysk text in Russian literature of the early 19th century

The paper deals with the elements of the Novorossiya text, or myth, in V.V. Izmailov's “Journey to Noonday Russia” in comparison with other works of Russian literature of the late 18th-19th centuries. This text in the grass can be represented as a system of local texts - of steppe, Kherson, Nikolayev, Ochakov, Odessa. The image of the Novorossiya steppe here is predominantly a non-tropical, wild, empty, and sometimes mortal space, i.e. an entropic topos in the process of ordering/mastering, which, in turn, actualizes the myths of creation and the apocalypse, which are essentially related to pre-temporal and post-temporal states of the world. The deserts of the steppe in the Izmailov’s text are contrasted with the desert of the demi-natural garden (in the version of the Novorossiya (Nikolayev) locus of Spassky), depicted in a sentimentalist way and suggesting the possibility of both contemplative solitude and erotic pleasure. Among the general features of the Novorossiya urban texts, we note a characteristic lacuna - the almost complete disregard of the Potemkin image and the weakened manifestation of the Catherine II image, which in later texts turn out to be firmly connected with the representation of Novorossiya space. The Kherson text is most widely represented by Izmailov, in which the mythologemes of the miraculous appearance of the city, the commercial city, the port city, the southern capital, which are also characteristic of Izmailov's variant of the Odessa text, are highlighted. Izmailov's motif of the attractiveness of urban space is also characteristic of both local texts. The mythologeme of cultural kinship between the new Kherson and Tauric Chersonesos is actualized within the common ancient myth overlapping with the perception of the liminal South of the Russian Empire. In addition, we note the mythologeme of the multiculturalism of Kherson, including the particular mythologeme “the city of churches”, which is also characteristic of the Izmailov's Nikolayev text. Within the framework of the multiculturalism and port character of Kherson, the mythological mediation of the city between the North and the South can be considered. The Nikolayev and Odessa texts are presented in the travelogue in smaller fragments. The mythologemes of the Odessa text are listed above. As for the Nikolayev text, it is characterized by the mythologemes “the city of shipbuilders, the port city”, “the city is the spiritual center of Orthodoxy in the south of Russia” and “the city next to which the romantic Spassky place is located”. Finally, Izmailov's Ochakov text differs from the above-mentioned local texts by the strong expression of the persono-sphere of the space of historical memory - the images of Minich, the directly unnamed Potemkin, Suvorov, as well as the emphasized liminality between Russianness and Turkishness. This corresponds to the mythologemes “Ochakov is the city of glory of Russian weapons” and “modern Ochakov is the city of battle ruins”. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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