«A whole new world for me»: K.D. Nosilov’s ethnographic fiction in the Russian literature of the late 19th – early 20th centuries
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2014.2.050Keywords:
ethnographic fiction; travelog; essay genres; symbolic initiation; evolutionary and colonial discourseAbstract
The author considers the notion of ethnographic fiction, which flourished in Russian literature in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The key feature of this kind of literature is the interconnection of fact (its being based on the facts of life) and fiction, or its literary character. The author studies the correlation of fiction with ethnography, which was a distinctive feature of Russian literature in the second half of the century. Thus, the author sees some characteristics of the new ethnography of the 20th century in the works of K. D. Nosilov, a popular writer at the turn of the century: e. g. an attempt to understand the Other (one of the Voguls) through his penetration into their life and spiritual world, and his consideration of the personal experience of the explorer and the recipient. In Nosilov’s book, At the Voguls (1904), the author studies the meta-plot of initiation,which the narrator is to pass but fails to finish.
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