V.V. Vereshchagin and the "invention" of the north in literature and journalism of the late XIX - early XX century (part one)

In the Russian intellectual space of the last quarter of the XIX - early XX centuries the North of the European part of the country was increasingly recognized as a special historical and cultural area. Remaining as before in the position of colonized outskirts with a huge but still unclaimed economic potential, now the North has begun to arouse interest of a different kind. In the reign of Alexander III, its political and strategic importance was realized; moreover, with the advent of the first railways in the region, it became much more accessible for travel than before. As a result, in the 1890s a specific northern discourse was being formed in journalism. A key role in this process was played by the travel notes of the Arkhangelsk governor A.P. Engelhardt (1897), in which the nomination "Russian" was used for the first time in relation to the North, although not in an ethnic, but in a political sense. In constructing the image of the region, ideas about its "abandonment", isolation were also used. The North was portrayed as a territory that passed the peak of its development in the XVI-XVII centuries, and then became more and more isolated from the rest of Russia, primarily due to the shift in trade and transport communications. By the 1910s, among the discursive dominants, the notion of the social and cultural identity of the North and the national significance of the monuments of its antiquity, as a heritage that was under the threat of extinction, was also entrenched. A special group of "Northern" narratives were evidence left by artists - in travel notes, short stories, autobiographies. In particular, A.A. Borisov, V.V. Perepletchikov, I.E. Grabar’ and, earlier than the others, V.V. Vereshchagin wrote about the North. An essay of the latter "On the Northern Dvina. On the wooden churches" (1895), considered in the paper, is an example of the author's construction of the image of the region.