ON THE LITERARY QUALITY OF “WALKING ACROSS THREE SEAS”

Abstract

The article examines the aspects and manifestations of the literature of Afanasy Nikitin's “Walking across Three Seas”. Attention is drawn to some plot and semantic oddities (double narrative, commercial gaps, quality of information, linguistic means, text addressing, questions of faith, the fate of the author) that need an adequate explanation. The presence of literature in the text, where it is not provided for, determines two research strategies – cryptological and theoretical. In the first case, you should check the origin of the text, clarify the attribution of authorship. In the second case, the text of the “Walking” appears as a material for a theoretical understanding of the nature of literary text generation. The cryptological approach captures the moments that can be reclassified from random to natural. The article argues that the ontological reason for the literariness of “Walking across Three Seas” is a literary paradigm that acts transpersonally and determines the features of the emerging work. The traveler and author of travel notes Afanasy Nikitin, the historiographer Karamzin, the orientalist Senkovsky and many other famous and unknown personalities involved in the creative history and receptive tradition of one of the most significant and mysterious literary monuments of Russian culture deserve grateful and unbiased study.