The travel essays of F. Nefedov (poetics of populist travelogue)

The article deals with the late stage of populist fiction of the beginning of 1890-s in the aspect of the issue of in-depth cognition of Russia, which was topical on the turn of the century. The subject of the direct analysis is the travel essays of the writer-ethnographer F.Nefedov, who is forgotten nowadays. The article describes some of the features of the poetics of the populist travelogue (the figure of the narrator, the compositional principle of contrast, the conflict within a single scene, etc.), the originality of the demonstration of the author's position and synthetical genre structure. Both ideological position of the author and new trends of documentary fictional genres ripening in Russian literature are reflected in the poetics of Nefedov’s travel essays.