«Mystical fear» of naive author: the literary code of ruinous topos in Russian-language internet travelogues

Abstract

A «naive» author who sees and reflects the world as it seems to him outside the literary conventions, turns into a sign of truthfulness and authenticity of evidence to a mass audience. The descriptions and photographs of ruin places have a capacious meaning, they allow us to reveal the symbolic patterns behind the writing, which in its considerable part can be attributed to naive or amateur texts. The purpose of the presented work is to determine what tools and literary canons travel bloggers as naive authors convey, constructing the images of ruins in travelogues in the Russian-language Internet. Revealing the repeatability and typological proximity of significant signs of the ruinous topos of bloggers’ travels will provide an opportunity to show the peculiarities of a naive author’s thinking, his attitude to literature. The paper reveals the tradition of depicting ruins, synthesizing Gothic and Romantic formulas and techniques in ruinous images of bloggers’ texts.