The meeting of a Russian with Europe in the travel writings of Peter the Great’s era (A. A. Matveev)

Abstract

The paper revises the traditional view at the travel writings of the era of Peter the Great. They are usually considered as naive works, and content of these works as identical to the biographies of it’s authors. The method of historical and linguistic research of V. M. Zhivov on the language of Russian writing is applied to the material of travelogues. The main purpose is to account for the pragmatics of the utterance in travel literature as in a phenomenon synthesizing heterogeneous features in principle and in the transitional Peter’s Era in particular. The paper is focused on the notes of the diplomat A. A. Matveev, compiled by him for himself as a result of his journey from the Hague to Paris (1705–1706). The narrative technique in Matveev’s text is examined (descriptions of the monuments of the French capital and the inscriptions to them in Latin), and it is shown that we should not reduce the function of Matveev’s work to purely diplomatic tasks of his actual journey. The descriptions recorded in Matveev’s text were politically charged: the author not only collected samples of inscriptions, but also demonstrated a new way for Russia to glorify the reigning monarch. This peculiar collection of Matveev is also considered in the context of cultural phenomena that were relevant at the beginning of the 18th century: private and court collections of rarities, embossing of commemorative medals, etc. The conclusion is made that borrowed elements change their function in the travelogue. In the historical and literary perspective, we must bring such works as Matveev’s notes out of the zone of marginal literary phenomena. In general, this allows us to see the key trends of the transitional period of the history of Russian literature. It is more appropriate to consider these processes not to state the Western European origin of individual elements of culture, but to analyze their pragmatics associated with the demarcation from the old Russian culture.