Yu. N. Voronov’s travel essay “Six Months in Colombia”: Creative history, ideological context, and poetics of genre
https://doi.org/10.26907/2782-4756-2025-81-3-79-86
Abstract
Yuri Voronov (1874–1931) was a Russian botanist, the author of numerous scientific works on the systematics of the flora in the Caucasus and other parts of the world. In 1926, he organized the first Soviet expedition to South America to study the vegetation cover of this part of the land. Colombia, a country located in the North–West of the South American continent, attracted special attention of the researcher. He described this trip in a fascinating way in a short travel essay called “Six Months in Colombia”. The essay was published as a separate brochure in 1929, an appendix to the journal “Bulletin of Knowledge” and was released by publisher P. Soykin in a special series “Nature and People”. Once published, Yu. Voronov’s book has long been a bibliographic rarity, a most valuable publication. Telling its readers about the nature of Colombia, its cultural attractions, the people living there, their psychology, everyday habits, ethnic customs and religious beliefs, it is not only a popular science and educational work, but also the one revealing a literary element that deserves attention and study. It manifests itself in the totality of those description qualities that are associated with the concept of a “narrative subject”. In addition, of interest is the language (style) of the work, its structure (the plot and compositional scheme), as well as the genre form, whose main, core component is the “impression” of what was seen, the internally integral “sketch” of the things observed in a thoughtfully unified movement of the plot line. In other words, the essay by Yu. Voronov is located at the intersection of two image planes – documentary and fictional. The text of the scientist fits quite organically into the literary and genre canon of the past eras. At the same time, Yu. Voronov’s essay bears traces of the ideological views of the 1920s, according to which the social world is divided into “exploiters” and “the exploited”, “the poor” and “the rich”, and there is practically no connection between them (the country’s working population deserves a better fate than the one they have).
About the Author
R. F. BekmetovRussian Federation
Bekmetov Rinat Ferganovich, Doctor of Philology, Professor in the Department of Russian
Literature and Methods of Teaching,
18 Kremlyovskaya Str., Kazan, 420008
References
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Review
For citations:
Bekmetov R.F. Yu. N. Voronov’s travel essay “Six Months in Colombia”: Creative history, ideological context, and poetics of genre. Philology and Culture. 2025;(3):79-86. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.26907/2782-4756-2025-81-3-79-86