Romantic and gothic Urals in T. W. Atkinson's travelogue

The aim of this article is to show how the image of the Urals is created in T. W. Atkinson's (17991861) travelogue Oriental and Western Siberia: a Narrative of Seven Years ' Explorations and Adventures in Siberia, Mongolia, the Kirghis Steppes, Chinese Tartary, and Part of Central Asia (1858). Despite the practical purposes of this journey, the travelogue is first of all a literary work without chronology. An artist and architect, Atkinson was one of the adepts of the European Gothic Revival of the 19th century, cultivating Neogothic and Romantic visual and verbal sensibility. First nine chapters of the book are about factories ("zavod") and scenery of the Urals. Visiting iron, gold, lapidary, armory factories one by one or sailing down the Chusovaya river, Atkinson not only describes the technologies but also examines the neighborhood, especially mountains dominating the terrain, and sketches the most picturesque scenery. He is interested in everything that is considered in English preromanticism and romanticism to be "picturesque": wild, interminable, striking, broken, rugged etc. The traveler shows Gothic and Romantic taste for the sublime, grand, great, various and irregular in Nature. He prefers to describe high cliffs, steep banks, deep gorges, impenetrable forests, snowstorms and thunderstorms. In the Urals, Atkinson is primarily fascinated by the variety of different kinds of stones, precious stones, minerals, both in terms of practical use and esthetics. In the shattered mountains of the Urals, he discovers caverns and "geological" ruins. His Gothic architectural taste is focused on the "perpendicular style" of the Ural mountains - highly elevated rugged crags, summits of "great height". A set of his tropes reveals some influence of the Gothic architectural style in such details as "buttresses", "towers", "pinnacles".