The ideological and artistic features of the travelogues about Turkey in the Russian parent state literature of the 1920s (based on Summer in Angora by E. Lanceray and Istanbul and Turkey by P. Pavlenko)

Abstract

The article discusses the travelogues of Turkey by E. Lanceray and P. Pavlenko. If, until 1917, the Russian literature had described Turkey from the ethnographical and geographic perspectives or had made it a part of modernist vision, in the 1920s, the authors wrote mainly about its political, social and cultural changes. The aim of the article is to analyze Turkey’s image in the parent state literature of the 1920s, close the lacuna in its Asian text and form a more complete understanding of the Russian literary process of that period. The article uses the descriptive, biographical and culture-historical methods of research. It concludes that so different writers as Lanceray and Pavlenko representing the unlike generations and artistic worlds and making different accents in their writings – on ethnography and the formation of a new statehood, respectively – are prone to interpret the revolutionary changes taking place in Turkey optimistically. Therefore, the Turkish motive and thematic vector should be viewed as a relevant stage of forming the ideology and aesthetics of a new artistic method, which is to be known as socialist realism subsequently.