The travel prose of Russian writers of the first third of the XX century is characterized by the search for genius loci - the genius of a place, that spiritualized image of a place or even a specific object that appears in the consciousness of the perceiving traveler under the influence of historical and cultural associations and reminiscences. Italy was of particular interest to Russian writers in this respect.

"In every book written about Italy, if only Italy is the goal of a certain "pilgrimage of the soul", there are certainly many lyrical pages, " - so the art critic and prose writer P. P. Muratov in the preface to his book about Italy, published in 1924, formulated the intentions and genre principles of his journey-a series of essays about Italian art and literature, with plot lines of biographies of artists and writers, permeated by the twilight light of the impending doom of this cultural world-myth (Muratov P. P. Images of Italy, Moscow, 1994).

The world of material culture, given by the writer in visible images, fused with the spiritual world-an appeal to other times and a past life, its spirit, the subjective tone of the narrative turns the text on Italian art into a kind of epic about the lost alma mater of European civilization.

Muratov's" Images of Italy "in the tradition of travel prose of Italian travels by Russian writers has become a kind of" tuning fork "(see essays on Italy by G. Boyadzhiev, V. Nekrasov, N. Ilina) and a myth about a myth, because the very attempt to reconstruct that contemplative image of the world has become a kind of "tuning fork" (see essays on Italy by G. Boyadzhiev, V. Nekrasov, N. Ilina).-

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The new attitude to life, which is present in Muratov's book, later turned out to be completely impossible.

This was already felt in the Italian essays of B. K. Zaitsev, to whom "Images of Italy", also a passionate Italianist, is dedicated. "Italy" was written by Zaitsev for 12 years, covering the time of two devastating wars. His narrative is characterized by the pathos of experiencing the collapse of the world, the ideals and ideas dear to the writer, and above all, the belittling of Christian humanism.

Zaitsev's Italian essays represent modernity against the background of the cultural halo of the great past, but they do not claim to be a complete image of Italy: "One should not expect an exhaustive list of notes and memoirs written in solitude and mainly for oneself" (Zaitsev B. K. Sobr. Soch. Berlin-Moscow, 1923. Book 7. P. 3).

The sense of historical inevitability of the death of this almost ghostly world of the past is combined with admiration for the beauty and indelible persistence of human handiwork, the strength of the traditional way of life. These feelings are sometimes expressed in high style: "Venice was born in finery, in finery she will meet her death hour... And frowns will not oppress the people of soft-voluptuous, elegant, oh, how lively " (Ibid., p. 13).

The interweaving of the joyful and mournful, born of paintings and places described by the writer, interrupting the ordinary and sublime narrative plans, using different verb tenses: present (instant and long) and future-all this makes Zaitsev's essays about Italy an original, lively and inspired work.

A common theme is the method of interrupting the main cities: Venice and Genoa, Florence and Siena, Pisa and Rome. "It is good to live in Genoa, it is bad to die" (Ibid., p.22), - is the story of a festive, bright, but indifferent city. Other thoughts are inspired by the beautiful Florence: "It is good to die in Florence, because I loved it most during my lifetime. And it brings you ecstasy and the shadow of the grave "(Ibid., p. 33). These reflections are crowned by the final phrase from the chapter "Assisi", dedicated to the homeland of St. Francis: "It's good to live in Assisi. Death is terrible and terrible everywhere for a person, but in Assisi it takes on a special shape - like a light, rainbow arch into eternity "(Ibid., p. 142).

It is noteworthy that Zaitsev's "Italy" is imbued with a Russian theme, expressed both in everyday associations and in thoughts about Pushkin and Gogol. The very dating of essays written in different years and in different regions is a significant detail: "Fioretti (flowers. - A. G.-K.) of St. Francis, the village of Pritykino, December 1918 "(Ibid.).

Andrey Bely's Italy as a stage of his trip to Tunisia (Bely A. Travel notes. Sicily and Tunisia. Moscow-Berlin, 1922) principled-

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but it is different from Muratov and Zaitsev's Italy. In general, Bely's travel prose is marked only by its inherent genre originality - a combination of scientific facts and impressionistic sketches, philosophical reflections and poetic allusions. Each object encountered by the writer or the impulse of experience received during the journey becomes overgrown with a network of associations, creating the style of narration that the author himself called mosaic: "Mosaic became a technique: I began to choose word for word as accurately as I picked up pebbles in Koktebel" (Bely A. Veter from the Caucasus. Moscow, 1928. P. 22). Bely's travel prose is characterized by drawing on the opinions and impressions of his predecessors, recalling philosophical concepts: "... I recall Goethe's light theory and Plotinus 'light of intuition" (Bely A. Ofeira, Moscow, 1921, p. 60). And, most importantly, the narrative of the White Traveler is extremely subjective, and this feature stands out strikingly against the background of the objective material that is included in many of his research poems.

Light-color perception, or rather, light - pointillist perception of moving pictorial reality, which images are spots on the picture drawn by the artist's imagination, dominates in" Opheira". Bely explains his creative task on the journey as follows:"...to give an accurate account of the flying spots of the path, of random thoughts flying by chance, of the thirst for accidents, my memory-kodak-clicked them; only now, after a few days, I developed the plates, slightly retouched them with ethnography and other "questions"; these "questions" are a retouch of mottled spots "(Ibid., p. 197).

The scientific purpose of the journey, which runs through the core theme of "Ofeira", formed the composition of the book, which was originally conceived as a series of pictures passed through the author's world. Bely also uses the principle of "bringing the diary to a literary level", which he declares, when working on his Caucasian notes (See Bely A. Problemy tvorchestva, Moscow, 1988, p. 10).

Of course, the most striking feature of Bely's travel prose style is the clear rhythm that organizes it, the masterly possession of intonation moves using sound effects of words, for example:" an old flock of churches trembles like a living nugget and shines with the brightest pearls of prophetic centuries " (Bely A. Ofeira, p. 97). Although excessive exploitation of the visual possibilities of the word sometimes leads to the destruction of the whole picture of the world.

The mosaic technique dominates consciously: in" Wind from the Caucasus " Bely reveals the laboratory of creating his travel works: exposing associative passages, combining different-everyday and picturesque plans, direct, diary-with an "artistic increment of the picturesque" view, and other features of his work.-

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his artistic perception, for example: "I am an old specialist in sunsets" (Bely A. Wind from the Caucasus, p. 120).

"Armenia", written by order, nevertheless bears the same signs characteristic of travel prose, to which were added the tendency to lexically color everyday details; the extremely dynamic rhythm of the narrative - so much so that it involves quite large amounts of text-rhythmic and syntactic periods; the love of creating neologisms (substantiation of verbs in the text). it is found in abundance in the "Wind from the Caucasus"; proden, proglyad, promerz, sverk, snyrch), expressive forms of nouns: obryviny, raskreski, vspykhi.

Bely's work in general and travel prose in particular serve as a vivid example of what in the 20s of the XX century was called ornamental prose, in which "the image prevails over the plot" (Shklovsky V. B. On the theory of Prose, Moscow, 1929, p. 216). The specifics of ornamental prose in relation to White are studied in detail: "The richness and "tightness" of the visual series, the rhythmic spiral deployment of the system of figurative means in the form of leitmotives, the development of a musical theme, the ambiguity (symbolism) of the images themselves and the richness of their associative connections that characterize the style of ornamental prose are due to the sharpened, artistically emphasized "thinking images" of the ornamentalist writer, often the dominance of artistic intuition over the usual rational thinking that leads to unexpected, qualitatively new results" (Novikov L. A. Ornamental prose of A. Bely, Moscow, 1991, p. 32). The author of the study introduces the concept of ornamental field - "a system for implementing visual means of a text with rich, increased imagery as a reflection of a special, poetic vision of the world "(Ibid. P. 117). Let us add that the desire for ornamentalism among the authors of travel prose in the XX century can be primarily noted among poets (O. E. Mandelstam, A. I. Adalis, N. S. Tikhonov) and among prose writers, in whose work poetry was a close companion (L. M. Reisner, B. M. Lapin, D. Ya. Dar and others). etc.).

In the genre of travel prose of the first post-revolutionary period, the greatest interest is the work of Larisa Reisner, whose visual talent was noted by the critic Voronsky: "The greatest gift of the writer went into the word, language. Each of her essays, each article resembled a tree, burdened with a lush and generous abundance of fruits, " he wrote in 1926 (Voronsky A. K. The Art of Seeing the World, Moscow, 1987, p. 322). Reisner's subject descriptions are aimed at revealing the carnal, visually and plastically convincing essence: "Peaches fall into the green silk grass from low-hanging branches without noise, fiery tomatoes on a dry stalk are beautiful and somehow too much-

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they are magnificent, like jewels worn in the morning" (Reisner L. M. Izbrannoe. M., 1980. p. 60).

It is indicative of the omission of intermediate comparative constructions, the preference for a spectacular concise metaphor when transmitting an action: instead of the hackneyed comparison "they listen like chained people" - " attention casts the crowd like bronze. The bronze glow is transmitted to the hands" (Ibid., p. 60).

The Afghan essays written in connection with the embassy mission to Kabul fully revealed Reisner's visual abilities. Along with the obvious "texture" of perception, "Afghanistan" is full of literary associations and reminiscences that attract the Bible, "Tales of a Thousand and One Nights", historical stories and legends about Tamerlane, Alexander the Great, the life of Harun al-Rashid, etc. Moreover - and this is the originality of the writer-she boldly tolerates associative historical comparisons on modern realities. Thus, the cloth factory worker is compared to the Old Testament Jacob.

In some fragments of the text, the prose is rhythmized: "The sand hills sing, where the sun-warmed sands intersperse like pearls, rise in a wave, fall into momentary valleys and again pour out into a mobile shaft with seraphic, incessant and sleepy music" (Ibid., p.109).

The expressive means used by Reisner reveal a kinship with contemporary poetry, in particular, recalling Pasternak's contiguous associations and rejection of the aesthetic hierarchy of image objects: "Low clouds go home from the morning shift without having had time to wash the coal dust from their faces" (Ibid., p. 283); Mandelstam's functional comparisons:"Red Army soldier-Crusader paladin of the red star"; Akhmatovsky oxymorons: "melancholy-warlike songs of Saadi "(Ibid.).

Among the authors who fully embraced October and, moreover, became prominent figures in the revolutionary events, Reisner retained a sense of continuity to the" class alien " culture.

Here is a small fragment from the epilogue of the book "Front", in which Reisner's connection with the "aesthetic" tradition is established in an unexpected content context: "What is it really? Desolation, death? That young freshness of a northern summer among houses broken down for fuel? These ruins in the once-crowded streets, two or three random pedestrians in deserted squares, and canals covered with mold and laziness, and settled on the muddy bottom of a barge? Is St. Petersburg really destined to turn into a quiet Russian Bruges, a city of the XVIII century, charming and breathless? "(Reisner, 1980, p. 104). The reference to Bruges is a "hidden reference" to the books about dead cities by J. R. R. Tolkien. Rodenbach's books, which were very popular in Russian educated society at the beginning of the century.

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O. E. Mandelstam's" Journey to Armenia " is a polemically sharpened work against Bely's poetics, which Mandelstam characterized in his essay "On the Nature of the Word" as follows: "He mercilessly and unceremoniously drives the word, conforming exclusively to the temperament of his speculative thinking" (O. E. Mandelstam, Collected Works: In 4 volumes, Moscow, 1991. Vol. 2, p. 246). For Mandelstam, the deep, ontological essence of the word is important, for White - its form. White takes the word figuratively and phonetically, and this is quite enough for him. Mandelstam values the inner form, the semantics of the word, which, according to his own statement in "Conversation about Dante", is a bundle of multidirectional meanings.

Such an attitude to the word implies its polysemy, and often symbolism, but the symbolism of Mandelstam's word usage is not in alienation from the realities of the world - on the contrary, in their internal, generic connectedness. Therefore, Mandelstam's associations are never arbitrary, but are conceptual in nature, and their rational core is reconstructed only by synthesis, assuming in the reader kindred artistic intuitions: "A meaning that is somewhat adequate to the author's can be revealed to the reader only if you try to keep everything written by him in view "(Bagration-Mukhraneli I. L. Cinematographic Stylistics of the" Egyptian brand " by Mandelstam / / Kinovedcheskie zapiski. 1991. N 12. P. 151).

"Journey to Armenia" is a complex, multi-faceted narrative, consisting of impressionistic laconic" brushstrokes " of the landscape, portrait sketches, parabolic excursions into history, letters to an acquaintance, original notes on painting and the theories of great naturalists and the modern theory of Gurvich, careful but distinct attacks of the poet-philologist on the japhetic theory of Marr, topical literary criticism, snatches, daily notes, an internal monologue with the epoch. Each of these motifs is a full-fledged germ of genre forms.

The unity of Mandelstam's travel text lies primarily in the thematic, or rather, motif plan. In addition to the solo theme, the text also includes the biblical theme, the theme of modernity, with which the author is in constant dispute, and the theme of a free person.

Once a trope, image, or metaphor arises, it is formed and repeated, becoming designations and characteristics of an object, person, or phenomenon. For example, entire chapters are semantically linked using overlapping paths. Gambaryan, the chemist, who is "as hot as a Frankish swordsman," is related to Lamarck, the naturalist; the childish love of acorns is related to the fact that Cezanne is "the best acorn in the French forests."

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"In Mandelstam's semantic cycles, not only keywords are linked, but all the ones he uses. World culture was mastered by him, domesticated and built up" (Bagrationi-Mukhraneli I. L. Decree, op. p. 151).

The mythological theme of "Journey to Armenia" is of particular interest. For example, the image of the salamander, which is deeply connected with the theme of personal and human behavior of Mandelstam himself - after all, the salamander, in addition to the well-known emblem of indestructibility, is also a symbol of righteousness.

Another example: "The Institute of the Peoples of the East is located on Bersenevskaya Embankment, next to the pyramid government house. A little further away, the ferryman was fishing, charging three kopecks for the ferry and dipping his boat up to the very rowlocks" (O. E. Mandelstam Decree. op. t. 2. p. 143). The rook, of course, is Charon's rook. But the government house is also called pyramidal not because of its external similarity to the pyramid, but because of its functional feature-tombs.

Let's list some of Mandelstam's artistic techniques in "Journey to Armenia". A combination of contrasts: worshipful picnics; a photographic oratory (a room with photo portraits. - A. G.-K.); tamerlane dobrodushiya.

Metonymy: the sound was stomping around (the engine wouldn't start. - A. G.-K. ); a well-intentioned castle; a roguish hare.

Synaesthetic epithets, i.e. expressing simultaneous perception by different senses: cold cramps; fishing net volleyball.

Characteristic parody-satirical subtext: "the woman also did not possess the key of knowledge"; "academician Marr, who just rushed through Moscow from the Udmurt or Vogul region to Leningrad"; "godless abundance of cabbage"; "ex-whips who stopped caring"; " the pale shadow of the Ibsen problem or the Moscow Art Theater actor in the country"and so on.

"Journey to Armenia" is certainly one of the highest achievements of the essayistic genre in Russian literature of the XX century. It is located at the intersection of the traditions of "Letters of a Russian Traveler" by N. M. Karamzin," Travels to Arzrum " by Pushkin and literature of the "Silver Age".

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