Travelling diaries of St. Gerasim (G. I. Dobroserdov) in the context of Russian pilgrimage literature

The article is devoted to the problem of interrelation between spiritual and secular principles in the history of Russian literature, which is topical for modern Russian literary studies and which is revealed on the example of studying pilgrimage literature, including Siberian authors. The practice of pilgrimage journeys to the Holy Land and their descriptions became common among Siberians only in the late 19th century in connection with the opening of the Palestine Society and its regional branches in Russia. However, at the level of images and motifs, pilgrimage travel appears in Siberian travel prose much earlier and enriches its traditional genres - missionary and bishop’s journals and diaries. This thesis is proven in the article using the example of the travel diaries of Bishop Gerasim of Astrakhan and Enotayevsk (1809-1880), in his youth Irkutsk priest Georgii Dobroserdov. First published in the late 1870s, his diaries were written in the 1830s-40s, during the heyday of the genre of the pilgrimage literary journey in the works of D. V. Dashkov, A. N. Muravyov, A. S. Norov and others. Dobroserdov’s diaries are not only close to these works chronologically, but are also similar stylistically: they combine the image of a Christian pilgrim with that of a sensitive sentimental traveller. At the same time, both sentimental and pilgrimage beginnings are forms of artistic generalisation deliberately introduced by the author in texts of a different genre nature - a missionary journal and a diary of a private journey, which originally had no pilgrimage purposes. The sentimental poetics gives the diaries their artistry, and the realisation of the pilgrimage plot gives them the status of a work of spiritual literature. The ideological and stylistic proximity between the works of secular writers and representatives of the clergy, such as A. N. Muravyev and Bishop Gerasim, representatives of central Russia and Siberia, testifies to the unity of the pre-revolutionary historical and literary process.