“POETIC LITTLE RUSSIA”: UKRAINIAN SPATIAL IMAGERY IN THE TRAVELOGUE TRAVEL LETTERS FROM ENGLAND, GERMANY AND FRANCE BY NIKOLAI GRETSCH
Authors:   Novosibirsk State Technical University, ZHDANOV S.S. ,   Siberian State University of Geosystems and Technologies
Published: December 2024

The article deals with images of the Ukrainian space in the travelogue Travel letters from England, Germany and France by Nikolai Gretsch. This spatial imagery is based on the phenomenon of liminality. Ukraine acts in the text as a border space between German (Foreign) and Russian (Own). The image of Galicia as a “no man's land” is highlighted. Formally, it belongs to the Austrian Empire, but its Germanness is denied with a number of oppositions, where orderliness, coziness, cleanliness, philistinism are associated with German loci (the image of a typical German burgher idyll), whereas Galician ones are marked by disorder, poverty, visual unattractiveness, dirt, darkness, narrowness (the image of an entropic space). The only “enclaves” of order and wealth in Galicia are represented by the palaces of magnates, which are sharply separated from the surrounding area of the village. Galicia is also opposed to Little Russia within the framework of the opposition “entropic space - idyllic space”. Volhynia being a part of the Russian Empire is more marked by the Own. The markers of its Russianness are Orthodoxy and the Russian language, associated with the peasant (non-elite) level of territory description. In addition, Volhynia is attributed as the Own by its connection with the historical space of the Russian Galician Principality. Within the left-bank Ukrainian (Little Russian) space, Poltava Province is mentioned, but its image is given in the most general terms and actually merges with the “typical” image of Little Russia as an idyllic space, “noonday Russia”. At the same time, both variants (the Little Russian and the Great Russian) are thought of by Gretsch as the single Own, the Russian space. The narrator's focus in the “Ukrainian” travelogue fragment is aimed at describing Kyiv as a center. This is emphasized by the vertical of hills, which elevates it above the horizontal of other Little Russian loci and marks its connection with the heavenly sacred space. It should be noted that the mythological chthonism of the Lower World is not inherent in the representation of Kyiv, on the contrary, the underground cells of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra are associated with the image of the heavenly (metaphysical) sun, i.e., with the Upper World. In general, the Kyiv spatial structure in Gretsch's travelogue is a combination of several images. There is a common idyllic element that fits Kyiv into the imaginative geographical Little Russia space and marks this locus with motifs of coziness, well-being, breadth, visual attractiveness, and legendarity. The connection of Kyiv with Great Russia is marked by the language. Kyiv is also depicted as an “eternal city”, i.e., the first city for the common Russian space. The Kyiv chronotope presupposes the conjugation of times: the past continues to live in the present, including the “visionary” experience of the narrator. Many Kyiv loci are also marked with the motif of sacredness, a connection with the Russian version of “sacred history”. At the same time, the oniric Kyiv dominates the image of the “real” city. The author declares no conflicts of interests.