Abstract
The diary of impressions written by a public servant and a writer of the early 19th century P.P. Svinyin during his travel to the United States of America is of a particular interest in terms of the way a direct word, which only registers the reality and fixes primary emotional responses of a human to what he has just seen, is transformed into a word of art, which comprises a wide spectrum of potential meanings that allow to come to universal values of events and phenomena of the reality. The article shows how first impressions of a young observer «sprouted» with time into plots, motifs and images of Svinyin’s historical novels, and taught him to work with «raw» historical material and to discern the essence of phenomena in random details.
Keywords
Diary, historical novel, Svinyin, Karamzin, plot, motif, image