A Thoughtful Realist in the Holy Land. Sketches of D. D. Smyshlyayev on Mount Sinai and Palestine in the Context of Pilgrim Literature

2015

Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки, Vol 17, Iss 2(139), Pp 56-70 (2015)

The book Sinai and Palestine. From the Travel Sketches of 1865 by Perm enlightener Dmitri Smyshlyayev is analyzed in the context of Russian pilgrim literature. It is shown that the author starts a dialogue with tradition and argues with its canon. In his sketches, Smyshlyayev offered a new variation of the genre in keeping with the spirit of ‘the epoch of realism’ of the 1860s. His account is organized along the contradictory combination of two types of discourse: the scientific and the guide-book one. Smyshlyayev’s travelogue both merges heterogeneous layers of writing and reveals different levels of consciousness: religious and critical consciousness of the Russian ‘thoughtful realist’ of the 1860s with his rational desacralizing view of the world, with his focus on delnost’ – one of the key concepts of the 1860s which could be roughly translated as ‘efficiency’ or ‘reasonability’.

article

Russian

Ural Federal University Press, 2015.

паломничество, травелог, русская культура 1860-х гг., Д. Д. Смышляев, А. Н. Муравьев, А. С. Норов., History (General) and history of Europe, Language and Literature