TRAVELOGUE AS A LITERARY ENCOUNTER WITH ANOTHER: THREE AFRICAN PLOTS

Abstract

The article presents a travelogue in various literary forms as reflection of a meeting with another. This may be a discovery, both expected and unexpected. The journey is motivated by an interest in what at first appears to be alien, unknown, hints at complex content, promises heuristic surprises, which are associated with hopes for Something Else. Geographical and cultural sites with such properties were often sought just across the sea. During a trip around the world in 1853, I. A. Goncharov came to the interior of South Africa, their indigenous inhabitants, Blacks, Kaffirs, Bushmen, aroused his interest as representatives of Another breed of man, an ethnocultural group alien to him, and he got to know them in order to understand their characteristics and place among other similar groups. N. S. Gumilev went to Africa in search of Another One. He not only transferred his creative intuitions to African soil, but also strengthened them, extended them into the field of fiction and mythology. Above all the material that he found in his travels and which formed the content of his African poems, another topic arises, more intimate for Gumilev and more metaphysical in its meaning. It is present in him not in a consistent, distinct development, but in separate images, in associations. The purpose of the Italian writer A. Moravia's trip to Africa is to get her accurate information about the natural environment, about the social structure and about the mores of people in all the countries he visits. But along with the reality of Africa, Moravia also feels something different about the modern world. He sees here a clear evidence of the first days of peace, after which all subsequent development, from Adam to the present day, had to take place in the order described and predicted in the Old and New Testaments.