Theodore Dreiser's autogeography: three travelogues about four worlds

The article provides a comparative analysis of the three travel books by Theodore Dreiser: A Traveler at Forty (1913), A Hoosier Holiday (1916), and Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928). The last one is also correlated with the publication of Theodore Dreiser’s Russian Diary by the University of Pennsylvania in 1996. The history of writing the book about the USSR and publishing it in Russia has been studied and commented on in sufficient detail by modern researchers. This article is the first attempt in literary criticism to compare the three books. The study presents not only a comparative but also a textual analysis of these travelogues, discovers patterns linking the books both chronologically and stylistically and turning them into a kind of autobiographical trilogy. For Dreiser, the study of three worlds (European, American and Soviet) is inseparable from the study of the fourth world - the world of his own consciousness. The analysis of the three travel books is provided in a biographical context, which allows a deeper and more thorough analysis of their factual and emotional content. The focus of the study is the problem of Theodore Dreiser’s self-identification as a writer and as American, which formed being influenced by travel impressions received during trips to European countries, including Germany - Dreiser’s historical homeland, America, including his native state Indiana, and across Soviet Russia on the eve of the so-called ‘great turning point’. Based on the study conducted, there are expressed some theoretical considerations regarding the interaction between the concepts of stereotype and reality in the space of literary text, and also the correlation between documentary and artistic principles in a travelogue. The article presents excerpts from A Traveler at Forty and A Hoosier Holiday translated into Russian. These travelogues have never been translated and published in Russia.