LITERARY HIGHWAYS AS A NEW CULTURAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL PHENOMENON

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to present to the geographical community a new cultural and geographical
phenomenon – a literary highway, identified by the author through empirical observations. Hence the tasks of the article
are to describe and define this phenomenon, to establish its typical characteristics, and to trace its functioning on the
regional material.
The author introduces and substantiates new concepts of literary geography – a literary polyhighway and transportgeographical discourse.
A literary highway is understood as a historical road ‘covered’ with texts of literary journeys of different times. In
those cases where literature develops polyhighways, i.e., historical roads running parallel within the transport corridor,
literary polyhighways are distinguished.
The interaction of travelogue texts with certain historical roads includes a range of transport issues in a broad
comparative geographical context, or transport-geographical discourse; among them are vehicles used, road features, trials
experienced on the road by authors or literary heroes, perception of roadside landscapes, and transport vocabulary.
In the article, geographical, historical, and literary properties of literary highways and polyhighways are shown
through the example of the metropolitan polyhighway ‘Moscow – Petersburg’, Siberian, Dvina, and Chui literary highways.
In applied t