The objectivity in understanding the surrounding space and the formation of the personality of the protagonist-narrator: "Letters of a Russian Traveler"

The subject of the study is the thematic sphere of N. M. Karamzin's book "Letters of a Russian Traveler" and its place in shaping perceptions of the material world in Russian literature at the end of the 18th century. The focus is on the problem of mastering reality in the poetics of sentimentalism and the peculiarities of Karamzin's creative position in this aspect. The genre and problematic-thematic complexity of "Letters of a Russian Traveler" is revealed at various levels of the text, which determined the characteristics of the organization of the material world within it. The relevance of the article is defined by the necessity of a holistic view of the dynamics of depicting the material world in 18th-century Russian literature, of which Karamzin's book "Letters of a Russian Traveler" can serve as a unique model. The aim of the article is to reconstruct the material world of "Letters of a Russian Traveler," to propose a typology of the material and everyday details in the book considering various principles that Karamzin used to organize its artistic world. The methodological basis of the study is structural-semiotic analysis of the text, which allows for the reconstruction of the laws of construction and artistic functioning of the system of material details within it, as well as elements of a comparative-typological approach, necessary for identifying the typology of material images in the book. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that it reveals the material level of Karamzin's text for the first time, which allows for conclusions about the specificity of the author's mastery of reality. The main conclusions of the conducted analysis are as follows: the material world of "Letters of a Russian Traveler" reflects the main artistic principles of Karamzin as a writer – the multi-level structure of the text and the dynamic nature of the communication between "author - reader"; the material realities in the book are grouped according to several principles – belonging to a specific sphere of life, the relationship between the objectively descriptive and the subjectively emotional, cultural fixation and situational conditioning of representations in the text. Altogether, this allowed the author of the article to conclude on the specificity of Karamzin's artistic mastery of reality, which determined the main direction of development of Russian literature in the late 18th – early 19th centuries.