Winter Notes on Summer Impressions by F.M. Dostoevsky as a ‘paradoxical’ travelogue

Statement of the problem. In F.M. Dostoevsky’s travelogue Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, there is an effect of a paradoxical narrative that is intentionally built on the resistance of the logic of the perceiving consciousness, which allows the author to express his perception of the world. The material consists of travelogues: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, Denis Fonvizin’s Letters from France to a Nobleman in Moscow, Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, Ivan Goncharov’s Frigate Pallada, and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from Underground. The purpose of this article is to analyze the narrative structure of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions in the context of the evolution of travelogue narrative models. Review of scientific literature. The studies analyzed have not been the subject of scientific comparison in the study of the Russian documentary travelogue of the 19th century by the author of the paper. Research methodology. To understand the specifics of the author’s ‘creative laboratory’ in the context of the travelogue genre, the following research methods are used in the article: biographical, structural-typological, and historical-literary. Research results. In the paradoxical logic of the narrator of Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, the author’s intention to describe the global problems of human communication in society is manifested. Through the form of ‘chaotic writing’, the features of the ‘underground hero’s’ writing are already formed in the travelogue and are expressed more in the form of a painful perception of the world. Conclusion. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s travelogue is defined as the pretext of the novella Notes from Underground, which processes documentary material about the writer’s real trip in the form of a paradoxical narrative that expresses the main features of the ‘underground consciousness’ type.