The purpose of this article is to reflect on the phenomenon of travel to the places in Venice associated with the Russian poet Iosif Brodsky and the way in which the Fondamenta degli Icurabili, a place of imagination that is the title of the Russian and Italian-language translation of the essay Watermark, functions in space and consciousness of travellers. The article focuses primarily on individual literary journeys that were reflected in or even inspired the traveller’s writing activities. The experiences of being in the Fondamenta degli Incurabili and trying to understand the meaning of the toponym were described by many authors of contemporary non-fiction texts about Venice: Yuri Lepski, Yelena Yakovich, Gleb Smirnov, Arkady Ippolitov, Ekaterina Margolis. Two texts are particularly noteworthy, i.e. the reportage by Yuri Lepski Brodskiy tol’ko chto ushël (2020), which is entirely devoted to the experiences related to the journey in the footsteps of the poet and Progulki s Brodskim i tak daleye. Iosif Brodskiy v fil’me Alekseya Shishova i Yeleny Yakovich (2016) by Yelena Yakovich, where Brodsky himself interprets the title of his essay. Methodological tools deriving from the field of geopoetics and cultural geography, such as the place of imagination or reading journeys, proved helpful during the development of the paper.
Zygmunt Krasiński, the most European of the Polish Romantic writers, composed many literary texts influenced by foreign travels. In his writing, specific geographical spaces were transformed at once into places of imagination and places of intimacy, forming a unique sphere of auto/bio/geo/graphy. This is especially noticeable in Krasiński’s poetic prose written in French, mainly in the half-private and half-literary travel impressions of his excursions in the Alps. The tension between a place of imagination and a place of intimacy is also reflected in the poet’s correspondence, which can be analysed as a textual form of interiorization of the strictly defined places. It is shown in the article on the examples of the Alps and Provence.
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