Temporal images in the travels of “mass sentimentalism”: From personal to idyllic

The article analyzes the system of temporal images in the travel texts of “mass sentimentalism” (using the works by V. V. Izmailov, P. I. Shalikov and P. I. Sumarokov as an example) in the context of the paradigm “social – cultural – artistic time”. The aim of the research is to substantiate the thesis about the image of time as a characteristic of the way the subject perceives a certain event / chain of events in quasi-historical retrospect, in connection with which three levels of perceptual time (time of the subject / personal time; historical time, idyllic time) were identified and defined. The scientific novelty lies in determining the ways of expressing these components in the travelogues of “mass sentimentalism”, which have not been studied in this aspect before, adding to the ideas about the specifics of the literary process in Russia at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, including the explication of temporal representations in travel prose. It is concluded that the image of the epoch in the travels of “mass sentimentalism” is reconstructed on the basis of spatial impressions. The core of the temporal-image structure is personal time (in the dynamics of private impressions, including accurately recorded ones), while the system of images of various historical epochs (from Kievan Rus’ to the 18th century) and variant idyllic constructions form the periphery.