Andrey Murav’yov’s travel in Abkhazia

The article is devoted to the little-known travel notes about Abkhazia by Andrey N. Murav’yov, an outstanding Russian spiritual writer, the pioneer of the genre of literary pilgrimage travels, the discoverer of Christian and Orthodox shrines in Russia and abroad for his compatriots and contemporaries. Travel essay “Abkhazia. Pitsunda”, included as a separate chapter in the book “Georgia and Armenia”, was created under the impression of the author’s trip in the spring of 1847 to the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus. It presents genre sketches of the city life of Sukhumi, descriptions of the luxurious southern nature, it gives excursions into the history of the region, and it characterises the features of the economic state. The main part of Andrey Murav’yov’s Black Sea memories concerns Pitsunda. As a deep connoisseur of the history of Christianity, Andrey Murav’yov traced its ancient roots in the land of Abkhazia, where the apostles Simon the Canaanean, Andrew the First- Called, St. John Chrysostom. In detailed descriptions of the ancient churches, the writer recorded their condition; despite the artistic form of the story, they have the value of a reliable historical document that helps to reconstruct many of the losses that occurred under the influence of time.

Representations of the Writer and his Work through the Pilgrimage, the Writer’s House and the Literary Tourism (Krüger, Leopardi, Nooteboom)

Cees Nooteboom’s short story Een ontmoeting in Recanati narrates the literary pilgrimage of contemporary German poet and publisher Michael Krüger in Recanati, the birthplace of the early 19th-century Italian writer, philologist, poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), where he visits his house. By an intertextual but also comparative approach, based on the works of Krüger and Leopardi, the article examines the representations of the writer and his work as they appear through modalities and spaces of the literary pilgrimage, of the visit to the house-museum of the writer and the of cultural tourism as well as of the "meeting" narrated by Nooteboom.

“Changing by Enchantment”

This chapter transitions to a discussion of “the people” as a nation, contextualizing its analysis within the rise of U.S. nationalism during and after the War of 1812. A work of American travel writing, Washington Irving’s Sketch Book showcases the rites of the Grand Tour, particularly literary pilgrimage, both to demonstrate U.S. competence for political sovereignty and to explore mystical communion between the Old and New World. Through an investigation of the sketch “Rip Van Winkle,” the chapter identifies an innovative mode of historical analysis that opens up an alternate understanding of the American people. The people are not a group of individuals in the here and now but a constellation of changing relations reaching backward and forward in time.

The ‘Charlotte’ cult: writing the literary pilgrimage, from Gaskell to Woolf

This chapter considers how writers and literary tourists imagined Charlotte Brontë during the fifty years after her death. It is framed by Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of CharlotteBrontë and Virginia Woolf’s essay, ‘Haworth, 1904’, both writers assessing Brontë’s legacy as an author. While Gaskell’s biography unleashed the ‘Charlotte’ cult, whose devotees became instrumental in the establishment of the Brontë Society in 1893 and the eventual opening of the parsonage as a museum, Woolf pondered the negative impact of literary tourism on the legacy of writers. For decades after her death, literary tourists sought traces of Brontë’s ghostly presence in Haworth, initiating the creation of the parsonage as literary shrine and a tourist industry based on the notion of literary pilgrimage. Analysing a range of accounts of visits to Haworth, along with obituaries, this chapter argues that Brontë’s reputation was initially shaped by myths and misconceptions as much as by her literary works.