Abstract

The article examines the Tale of the Median Place of the 15th century in the edition of the Rumyantsev collection of the 17th century. The Tale is organically integrated into the corpus of texts on oriental subjects from the collection, representing a kind of connecting text between Byzantine-Turkish themes and travel notes (khozhdenie). It can be assumed that the main function of the Tale in the collection was an artistic attempt to describe the shrines of Mecca and Medina in the 15th century which make a kind of transition from the Tale of the Capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, which continued the Byzantine theme (extracts from various chronicles about Constantinople), to works on oriental themes (Triphon Korobeinikov’s Journey to the Holy Places). This is evidenced by the heterogeneity of the artistic construction of text, combining the objectivity of a documentary essay and the subjectivity of personal perception of what was seen, which was characteristic of works of this genre dating back to the 16th century. The poetics of the Tale is a fairly striking example of a combination of expressive and figurative elements and everyday descriptive details in order to give the text an additional figurative tone, which helps to simultaneously present exotic countries and their attractions to the reader in a visual (documentary) and entertaining way. 

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