The spa narrative of long 19th century Europe as map and network

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The spa narrative of long 19th century Europe as map and network

Olga N. Kulishkina

Larisa N. Poluboyarinova

Abstract

The resort network of modern Europe developed over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. Emerging at different times (first in Great Britain, then in France, then in Germany and Russia), all national spa centers in one way or another reproduce a single, taken from the Roman tradition of the term (as a result of direct “inheritance” or -- as in Russia -- through a foreign national settler) type of organization of living space. Being subordinated to the “dual purpose of curing and entertaining the sick” (Guy de Maupassant), this space turns out to be correlated with the idea of an “other” (different from normative-socialized) life. Separate segments of this single European network space of codified deviancy, linked typologically and genetically, can in turn be represented as bundles of various socio-cultural connections arising around specific spa “characters” (as an example -- the literary and writing network of Baden-Baden resort). Finally, another type of connections correlated with the European spa environment is its literary representations, the 19th century European spa narrative, the main features and agents of which are discussed in the article, using Mikhail Bakhtin's category of genre memory and with the help of the SNA method. The research allowed to separate out two important clusters within the European fictional spa narrative, firstly the lineage of Tobias Smollett and secondly the lineage of Walter Scott. Finally, it is demonstrated how both lines come together outside the 19th century in the work of W. G. Sebald.

Keywords: literary spa narrative, genre memory, social network analysis, distant reading, literary mapping.

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Êóëèøêèíà Îëüãà Íèêîëàåâíà

Ïîëóáîÿðèíîâà Ëàðèñà Íèêîëàåâíà

Êóðîðòíûé íàððàòèâ «äîëãîãî XIX âåêà» â åâðîïåéñêîé ëèòåðàòóðå: òîïîñ è ñåòü*

Êóðîðòíàÿ ñåòü ñîâðåìåííîé Åâðîïû ñêëàäûâàåòñÿ íà ïðîòÿæåíèè XVIII-XIX ââ. Âîçíèêàÿ â ðàçíîå âðåìÿ (ïåðâîíà÷àëüíî íà òåððèòîðèè Àíãëèè, çàòåì âî Ôðàíöèè, äàëåå â Ãåðìàíèè, Ðîññèè), âñå íàöèîíàëüíûå êóðîðòíûå öåíòðû òàê èëè èíà÷å âîñïðîèçâîäÿò åäèíûé, âîñïðèíÿòûé îò ðèìñêîé òðàäèöèè òåðì (â ðåçóëüòàòå íåïîñðåäñòâåííîãî «íàñëåäîâàíèÿ» ëèáî -- êàê â Ðîññèè -- ÷åðåç èíîíàöèîíàëüíîãî ïîñðåäíèêà) òèï îðãàíèçàöèè æèçíåííîãî ïðîñòðàíñòâà. Îòäåëüíûå ñåãìåíòû ýòîãî åäèíîãî åâðîïåéñêîãî ñåòåâîãî ïðîñòðàíñòâà, ñâÿçàííûå êàê òèïîëîãè÷åñêè, òàê è ãåíåòè÷åñêè, â ñâîþ î÷åðåäü ìîãóò áûòü ïðåäñòàâëåíû â êà÷åñòâå ïó÷êîâ ðàçíîîáðàçíûõ ñîöèîêóëüòóðíûõ âçàèìîñâÿçåé, ñåòåé, âîçíèêàþùèõ âîêðóã êîíêðåòíûõ êóðîðòíûõ «ïåðñîíàæåé» (êàê ïðèìåð -- ëèòåðàòóðíî-ïèñàòåëüñêàÿ ñåòü êóðîðòíîãî Áàäåí-Áàäåíà). Íàêîíåö, åùå îäèí òèï ñåòåâûõ ñâÿçåé, ñîîòíîñèìûõ ñ êóðîðòíûì ïðîñòðàíñòâîì Åâðîïû, -- åãî ëèòåðàòóðíûå ðåïðåçåíòàöèè, ñåòü êóðîðòíûõ òåêñòîâ, íàððàòèâèçèðóþùèõ òîò ñëîæíûé êîííîòàòèâíûé êîìïëåêñ, êîòîðûé êóëüòóðíîå ñîçíàíèå íîâîãî âðåìåíè ñîîòíîñèò ñ êóðîðòíûì òîïîñîì.  ñòàòüå â îïîðå íà èäåþ «ïàìÿòè æàíðà» Ì. Ì. Áàõòèíà è ñ èñïîëüçîâàíèåì ìåòîäîëîãèè ñåòåâîãî àíàëèçà ïðîñëåæèâàþòñÿ íåêîòîðûå ìîìåíòû îôîðìëåíèÿ ýòîé åâðîïåéñêîé ëèòåðàòóðíîé ñåòè íà ïðîòÿæåíèè XIX â. Èññëåäîâàíèå ïîçâîëèëî âûäåëèòü äâà âàæíûõ êëàñòåðà â åâðîïåéñêîì õóäîæåñòâåííîì êóðîðòíîì íàððàòèâå -- ëèíèþ Òîáèàñà Ñìîëëåòòà è ëèíèþ Âàëüòåðà Ñêîòòà.  èòîãå ïðîäåìîíñòðèðîâàíî, êàê äàííûå ëèíèè îáúåäèíÿþòñÿ çà ïðåäåëàìè XIX â. â òâîð÷åñòâå Â. Ã. Çå- áàëüäà.

Êëþ÷åâûå ñëîâà: åâðîïåéñêèé êóðîðòíûé íàððàòèâ, ïàìÿòü æàíðà, ñåòåâîé àíàëèç, äàëüíåå ÷òåíèå, ëèòåðàòóðíîå êàðòèðîâàíèå.

Introduction

Parallel to the expanding map of European spa resorts Strictly speaking, for the period we are interested in, a differentiation could be made between the spa resort established in the 18^th century and the emerging seaside resort [Shields 1991: 16]. Since this difference is not principled for the complex of questions we treat, we dispense with it in our investigation. The words spa and resort are hereby used synonymously., which became far denser as railroads spread [Eidloth 2012], another taxonomic formation emerges -- a map of literary spa representations. Taking up Beata Borowka-Clausberg's intuition of “a kind of Warburg's Mnemosyne atlas” of literary spas [Borowka-Clausberg 2012: 228], we set us the task of mapping 19th century European spa narratives as a polycentric transnational network, focusing on key nodes and most important ties of the system.

Two major concepts have been used as a theoretical basis for the study. These are Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of “genre memory” (“pamjat' zhanra”), which implies the temporal resistance and transferability of units of literary substance across national borders. Furthermore, we are guided by Franko Moretti's attempts at literary mapping and his idea of `distant reading' and the procedure employed in recent literary network research.

Our research, centered on 19th century European spa narratives, was primarily inspired by Franko Moretti's idea of reconstructing an atlas of the 19th century novel. In particular, we are close to Moretti's point of view, the idea geography is not an inert container, is not a box where cultural history `happens, but an active force, that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth. Making the connection between geography and literature explicit, then -- mapping it: because a map is precisely that, a connection made visible -- will allow us to see some significant relationships that have so far escaped us [Moretti 1998: 3].

Make a connection visible -- this concept was in a broader sense of the word, adopted in Moretti's later formulated intuition of `distant reading, which on the one hand recognizes that literature is “an old territory more or less”.

But within that old territory, a new object of study: instead of concrete, individual works, a trio of artificial constructs -- graphs, maps and trees -- in which the reality of the text undergoes a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction. `Distant reading' I have once called this type of approach where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models [Moretti 2005: 1].

According to this impulse our goal is to present the key figures (authors, texts) of the European spa and seaside resort narrative on the one hand as a unified graph, and on the other hand as a European map whose literarily relevant territories (England, France, Germany, Austria, Russia) and the lines of force and transfer connecting them remain recognizable.

Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of “genre memory” presupposes that one and the same content and formal structure can appear in different national literatures in the course of decades and centuries and be reflected in concrete works, i. e. genre variants:

The literary genre by its very nature reflects the most stable, “age-old” tendencies in the development of literature. The genre always retains undying elements of archaicism. True, this archaic, so to speak, is preserved in it only through its constant renewal, its updating. The genre is always one and the other, always old and new at the same time. Genre is revived and renewed at each new stage of the development of literature, in each individual work of a given genre. This is the life of the genre [Bakhtin 1972: 178-179].

An author who turns to a genre would hereby a priori be associated with his predecessors, i. e. authors who have already written within the framework of that genre. Connection of a similar kind involved Mark Newman when he separated out citation (and cocitation) networks:

In general, however, if one paper might cite another it is usually an indication that the contents of the earlier paper are relevant in some way to those of the later one, and hence citation networks are networks of relatedness of subject matter [Newman 2018: 37].

This “relatedness of subject matter” will be our task to visualize and interpret in the network of spa narratives.

The study to be presented is the first approach to the phenomenon of the European spa narrative in the 19th century in terms of literary network analysis. Thus, it aims to outline the problem area, identifying the most important actors as nodes and denoting lines of power and distribution of ties. Nevertheless, it refrains from the all-encompassing fixation of the overall picture, including the lack of important data from the literary field of Spain, Italy, Scandinavia, Poland, etc., which still has to be obtained.

We will operate with the basic concepts of the social network analysis (SNA) such as social network, actor, nod and tie. Accordingly, the nodes are writers from the European literary field who used the genre of spa narration (spa novel) in the 19th century and their texts. In our study, relationships between these nodes are understood as ties. Ties are created when the relevant actors (authors) use one and the same genre structure in their fictional narratives.

The direction of the connection will depend on the temporal criterion. The later network actors were influenced or inspired by the earlier ones. In this sense works the well-known literary procedure of the “influence”, which is examined by the receptive aesthetics and intertextuality research. But there were certainly cases of cross-fertilization of authors who were contemporaries, e. g. Turgenev and Sacher-Masoch.

In determining which authors should be considered as representative for fictional spa narration, we focused on the corresponding national literary histories of Great Britain, Germany, Austria, France, and Russia, as well as on the data presented in the overview studies by Borowka-Clausberg [Borowka-Clausberg 2012] and Kitanina [Kitanina 2009], which list the key authors and works of spa narrative.

We assume that one of the authors has produced at least one spa narrative (in fact, there were sometimes several, e. g. Austen, Turgenev). Since individual works do not function as nodes in our case (although such a view is possible), we will further turn to some works as examples or proofs without listing them herein. The nature of the relations between the authors was verified and proved mainly thanks to the relevant secondary literature, letter and diary corpora, as well as to data in biographies of the authors. To demonstrate the spread of the spa narrarive, we sometimes turn to other authors outside the list of authors presented in the visualisation. resort narrative cluster

In the further explanation we are going to have a closer look at three points. First, we will outline the problem of the spa literary narrative as such. Then, we will try to place Tobias Smollett's line within the network discussed using the technique of “the literary mapping”. And finally, we will turn to the lineage of Walter Scott as a part of the network of European spa narratives.

Literary Spa Narrative: Overview

Literary reflections of spa culture have repeatedly come to the attention of researchers, but mostly in an indirect (and in this respect rather episodic) way. References to relevant literary texts can be found in studies devoted to various aspects of European history of resorts: as a kind of illustration of such (in case a particular resort has become a place of action or creation of a work; classic examples here -- the representation of Bath and Brighton in the novels of Jane Austen, the Russian Riviera in Chekhov's “The Lady with the Dog”) or as material to demonstrate the complex cultural and symbolic aura of resort topoi, interpreted in the framework of various socio-cultural studies and interdisciplinary projects.

The research of the latter type is connected with productive reflection of the resort as a utopian world, alternative to the world of the real and the regular In accordance with the notion of topoi suggested by E. R. Curtius, as “cliches that are literarily generalizable” and “spread over all areas of literarily recorded and shaped life” [Curtius 1993: 79-80], the resort appears in modern literature as a “new” topos, in whose semantics old connotations of “paradise” and locus amoenus are perceptible [Fuhs 1992: 181-182]., routine and conventional one. Thus, deviancy becomes a specific feature of resort existence, which implies for an individual falling out necessarily and completely from all traditional forms of their everyday existence. It turns out to be the most important component of the “mythology of resort rest” by Roland Barthes, who speaks in “Mythologies” about “workers who change their essence on vacation and, once on the beach, become just holidaymakers” (essay “The Writer on Vacation”, 1954) [Barthes 1991: 27-28].

Drawing on the research of Victor Turner, Henri Lefebvre and Mikhail Bakhtin, Robert Shields in his 1991 book mentions the resort among the `places of margin' under consideration, noting that “liberation from the regime of normative practices and performance codes of mundane life” [Shields 1991: 84], “destabilisation of official meanings and authoritative discourses which rely of clear oppositions and categorizations” [Shields 1991: 93] is inherent in the resort as a liminal and (because of its medico-hedonistic orientation) carnivalized space.

Finally, as a special (different) space in relation to traditional society, the resort is often related to the well-known Foucauldian intuition of heterotopia [Foucault 1986; Noak 2011; Kohler 2015; Lotz-Heumann 2022]. In this very perspective, based on Foucault's reasoning, the resort topics of Ivan Bunin's stories are interpreted in Eleonora Shestakova's article “Heterotopias of the resort town in Bunin's world” [Shestakova 2015].

An undoubtedly notable attempt at exploring the “sanatorium-resort” topos of Russian prose was undertaken by Henrike Schmidt, who views it as a representation of the power discourse within Russian official culture in the 19th-20th centuries [Schmidt 2014]. However, we would find it useful to distinguish two topoi, that of resort and that of sanatorium. The latter implies significantly different relations between “norm” and “abnormativity” than the resort topos (understood according to Lefebvre) presuppose, because the “therapeutic discourse” dominating the proper “sanatorium” usage is commonly associated with strict dictate (regulation). Consequently, the “sanatorium” topoi are very relevant for the totalitarian sociocultural practices of the 20th century, being distinctly reduced in the connotative aura of the resort.

Another important example of considering the literary representation of the resort in the context of these cultural concepts is Tintti Klapuri's monograph, where the “chronotope of the sea resort” in “The Lady with the Dog” is analyzed as a form of universal “chronotope of modernity” [Klapuri 2015].

Recognizing the unconditional productivity of this approach, which is largely based on the methodology of cultural studies, we would like, however, to look at “spa texts” from specifically literary perspective, raising the question of the proper literary (in line with the concept of “literariness” by Roman Jakobson) status of the spa topos.

As for literary studies, the research into resort semiotics in fictional texts has until recently been aimed at providing referential background for a corresponding text or its pretexts through historical and literary commentary (for example, Austen's “Persuasion”, Turgenev's “The Smoke”, Proust's “A lombre des jeunes filles en fleurs”).

What is particularly important in the context of our subject, however, is the research into perception of Walter Scott's only non-historical novel, “St. Ronan's Well” (1823) by 19th-century Russian literature. This research line goes back to the 1920s with Nikolai Izmailov [Izmailov 1928] first dwelling on the topic and is continued by Leonid Arinstejn [Arinstejn 1979], Mark Altshuller [Altshuller 1992], and Tatiana Kitanina [Kitanina 2009].

These studies made it possible to identify a number of texts correlating with Scott's novel. These are attributed by Altshuller as a special genre variety -- “the resort novel”. He also emphasizes a number of characteristics of this genre, such as the closed environment in which the action is concentrated, the idleness of the characters, their detachment from daily routine and their preoccupation with everyday life.

An important addition to the researcher's conclusions was the study of Kitanina, who linked Pushkin's project of “The romance on the Caucasian Waters” (1827), Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky's novella “An Evening on the Caucasian Waters in 1827” (1830) and Lermontov's novel “A Hero of Our Time” (1840), through Scott's Spa text which influenced all three of them, to European “watering”-literature, which, in turn, has its origins in Tobias Smollett's late novel “The Expedition of Humphry Clinker” (1771). Kitanina also substantially described the specific situations and characters inherent in that kind of fiction.

Extremely interesting and fruitful observations and conclusions of researchers, however, remain, in our opinion, just a list of some similarities and features of a number of texts that do not form a structural and semantic whole. Such a whole, however, is necessary as a certain invariant, on the basis of which (to paraphrase Rolande Barthes) it would be possible to analyze and describe different variants (variations) of the European resort narrative “in terms of deviations” [Barthes 1977].

It seems that this discursive invariant of the spa topos in European narrative prose of the modernity era, or, more narrowly, of the long 19 th century, is determined -- at the author's level -- by an essential (value-semantic) tension between the traditional attitude to the moralistic taxonomy and the modern intention of anormativity, which (tension) at the hero level can be designated by the oxymoronic characteristic: the codified deviancy.

Tobias Smollett's Transmission Line

The canonization of the resort topos with mentioned above characteristics as aesthetically productive is connected with the name of Walter Scott. However, the first fiction-narrative presentation of traditional fragments of 18th-century spa guidebooks -- humorous sketches-anecdotes depicting motley spa communities -- is associated with Tobias Smollett's epistolary novel “The Expedition of Humphry Clinker” (1771). The representations of “damaged moralism” on the waters of fashionable Bath open a long line of spa narratives, whose creators exploit the fictional potential of the spa topos as a place of “natural accumulation” of the most diverse types and figures in conditions of officially permitted `freedom of manners' discovered by Smollett. Smollett's satirical and moralistic resort topoi are directly echoed in resort texts, which are closest in time (and distinctly Smollett-oriented): Ludwig Tieck's “Naturfreund” (1797), Jean Paul's “Dr. Katzenberger's Badereise” (1809), Jane Austen's “Northanger Abbey” (1798-1803), “Persuasion” (1817), “Sanditon” (1817), partly also “Emma” (1816) and “Pride and Prejudice” (1813), Heinrich Heines “Die Bader von Lucca” (1824), Adalbert Stifter's “Der Waldsteig” (1844).

This original moral setting is present in Scott's “St. Ronans Well”, Lermontov's “water society” in “Princess Mary” and Dickens' “The Pickwick Papers” (1836-1837). In the latter novel, being dedicated to the club of gentlemen traveling through England and observing `human nature' and “old English manners,” one of the suitable places of action is the traditional resort of Bath.

Finally, the “little Babylon” Baden-Baden, which invariably attracts the attention of commentators of Turgenev's “The Smoke” (1867) and Dostoyevsky's “The Gambler” (1866), as well as the vicissitudes of resort life in its literary counterpart -- the French resort Chatel-Gillon -- in Maupassant's later “Mont-Oriol” (1886-1887) and Proust's Balbec -- all these are distant, but no less distinct `replicas' of Smollett's “satirical and moralistic” resort topics.

Such topics, however, already receive a specific overtone in Austen, whose usage of a resort as the main place of action in her novels helps to build up tension in plot development. Thus, the romantic story of Catherine Morland (“Northanger Abbey”), of whom “no one... would have supposed her born to be an heroine”, begins after her family's rich neighbor, Mrs. Allen, “a good-humoured woman, fond of Miss Morland, and probably aware that if adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad” [Austen 1803], invites Catherine to go to Bath.

It is this seme of `possibilities' available to both the author and the hero (only) in a “special”, different from the “normal” society in its parameters, legalized deviant space of the resort, that brings important overtones into the story determining the further fate of this topos in European literature of the 19th -- up to the early 21st centuries.

We can catch it, by the way, in Smollett too: the disappointed “reflections on the manners of our time” of one of the central characters in the novel, Mr. Bramble, who observes resort life in Bath (where “debauchery and wantonness truly reign. noise, clamour, bustle” [Smollett 1771]) are “softened” by the exact opposite reaction of his niece, Lydia, -- the girl is absolutely delighted by the new, exciting experiences available to her only in Bath.

Walter Scott's Transmission Line

While in case of Smollett it is no more than “catching”, Walter Scott, choosing a healing spring as the setting for his “St. Ronan's Well”, in the later (1832) preface to the novel, quite unambiguously and definitely insists on the exceptional opportunities that the writer has in this case, wishing to portray “modern life” authentically, while achieving the integrity and dynamism of the plot:

The scene chosen for the author's little drama of modern life was a mineral spring... which are supplied with the usual materials for redeeming health, or driving away care. <...> The unprincipled gamester, the heartless fortune-hunter. [t]he impostor, the gambler. are to be found at such retreats. a sprinkling of persons called by the newspapers eccentric characters. <.> We find men of every country playing the eccentric at these independent resorts of the gay and the wealthy, where every one enjoys the license of doing what is good in his own eyes. It scarce needed these obvious remarks to justify a novelist's choice of a watering-place as the scene of a fictitious narrative. Unquestionably, it affords every variety of character, mixed together in a manner which cannot, without a breach of probability, be supposed to exist elsewhere. [Scott 1823].

Thus, Scott links the proclaimed possibilities quite explicitly to the specificity of the spa topos, which for the first time, as far as we can judge, in European fictional narrative practice is here reflected on as a space providing a real opportunity for a- or anti- normative (in terms of everyday consciousness) behavior -- due to “an entire change” of one's “system of ordinary life”, “legitimate” idleness, the “indulgence” of moral attitudes, and a demonstrative mixing of national and class behavioral codes.

In his “Theory of the Novel” Guido Mazzoni, when building a Map of the Nineteenth- Century Paradigm, highlights special “historical-philosophical importance” [Mazzoni 2017: 20] of Jane Austen's and Walter Scott's works. Not least, he does so because of their ability to make “everyday life especially narratable” [Mazzoni 2017: 266] through “break<ing> the social order and generat<ing> unpredictable stories” [Mazzoni 2017: 267]. Taking up Mazzoni's idea and developing it, it can be noted that the insertion and active elaboration of the spa topos was undoubtedly one of the important techniques that helped both authors to fulfill this crucial intention.

The generalized description of the development of a “typical” resort plot in 19th century European prose could be summarized like this: Codification of `spatial' liberation from traditional (socially normalized) forms of life, putting in their place conventionally free movement of the body in limited space (walking as the main type of activity in resort everyday life), as a result -- deviant activity of the subject, which has, as a rule, consequences for his subsequent life.

From Scott's novel onwards, mesalliance, adultery, gambling (cards, roulette), excessive wine drinking, and, finally, the dominant role of women in resort space (as compared to the dominance of men in “normal” spaces) have become specific forms through which the conventional deviancy of life in resort narratives manifests itself.

Thus, initially (with Smollett) marked grotesquely and satirically, the deviancy of resort life as early as in the literature of the first half of the 19th century (in the texts of Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Jean Paul, Heinrich Heine, Johanna Schopenhauer, Adalbert Stifter) gets correlated with the idea of personal freedom. This determines the importance of the resort topos for the European fictional narrative of the “long 19th century” which is connected above all with the so-called “growing hero” (in other translation -- `Man in the Process of Becoming') / `stanovyascijsya geroi' (M. Bakhtin), the vicissitudes of whose private fate “reflect in themselves the historical formation of the world itself”, who “is forced to become a new, unprecedented type of man” [Bakhtin 1986: 19].

In this very connection, the “resort” novels by Ivan Sergeevic Turgenev (“The Smoke” 1867; “Torrents of Spring”, 1873) and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's “Venus in Furs” (1870), which is intricately related to the two above mentioned Turgenev's novels, prove to be landmark texts for the formation of the resort paradigm. (The action of “Venus in Furs”, as we recall, begins “in a little resort in the Carpathians” (see: [Kulishkina, Polubojarinova 2016]).)

It is in “The Smoke”, it seems, that the `resort paradigm' finally takes shape, which remains relevant for all subsequent representations of the resort in European fictional practice. The locus of spa or seaside resort as a space of codified deviation gets a number of significant connotations here, thanks to which in further fictional narrative practice the resort is discoursed as “a topos of another life”, “a realized utopia” (M. Foucault) where an individual gains a different place in life, which he could not find or acquire in the traditional society.

This resort illusion (if we recall here another of Foucault's definitions) of a different (“new”, “other”, “a different sort of”) is expressed in the key sentence that Chekhov's heroine Anna Sergeevna says to Gurov in Yalta: “I have been tormented by curiosity; I wanted something better. `There must be a different sort of life,' I said to myself. I wanted to live! To live, to live!” [Chekhov 1899] (allocated by us. -- O. K., L. P).

Analogous to “The Lady with the Dog”, but already several decades earlier in Turgenev's “The Smoke” this illusion corresponds primarily to a love line, in which a traditional form of resort deviancy -- the power of women over men -- is realized with unusual completeness. It is the heroine, Irina, as has long been noted, who dots all the i's by making decisions -- contrary to Litvinov's inability to make ones: it is she who first says “yes”, changing what the hero has had before to a “different life” (illusory life -- just remember all Litvinov's “escape” projects), then -- she also says “no”, essentially -- it is by this decision of hers that the hero finally “finds” a new (different) life with Tanya.

The text by Sacher-Masoch (written, we can assume, under the influence of “The Smoke”, which, in turn, is later clearly echoed in the resort history of Turgenev's “Torrents of Spring”) is also very important in this connection. It is sufficient to mention the famous “Contract between Wanda von Dunayev and Severin von Kuzimsky”, a sort of reflection on exclusive resort deviance (the phantasm of masochism), framed as a kind of “life project”. Its implementation (“validation”) is supposed to take place outside the legalized, deviant resort topos (as we recall, the contract initiated and negotiated in the resort comes into force, and is actually signed after the heroes leave, in Florence [Kulishkina, Polubojarinova 2016]). This detail additionally marks an important turning point in the history of the European spa narrative, when the spa topos of “legalized deviancy”, which Scott already interpreted as a “space of possibilities”, begins to acquire the distinct status of a “space of (possible) choice of (different) fate” -- as it will, as it was already said, often be presented later in the European cultural context.

Thus, Masoch's Severin, driven away from the Carpathian resort in Wanda's carriage, brings to mind Turgenev's Sanin, driven to “another life” from Wiesbaden “on the narrow front seat” of the road dormez of Marya Polozova and her husband [Turgenev 1872], Chekhov's Gurov, who “had two lives” [Chekhov 1899] after Yalta, and -- if we allow ourselves to go beyond the marked time period of the “long 19th century” -- the characters from the “spa” film novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet (“L'annee derniere a Marienbad”, 1961), where an unexpected allusion to a Chekhov's text will appear in the heroine's famous question: “Qu'avez-vous d'autre a moffrir?” [Robbe-Grillet 1961: 116].

And finally, on the contrary, in Sebald's Jacques Austerlitz: caught up in socialist Marienbad by the illusion of another, not given to him (taken away from him) real- biographical, personally-established life, Sebald's hero, as we remember, experiences a specific state of “progressive incapacity”, “mute”, which affects the entire course of his further existence (see: [Kulishkina, Polubojarinova 2019]).

Fig. 1. The Network of European spa narrators in 19th century

Fig. 2. The Network of European spa narratives in 19th century

Finally, confirming the clarity and usefulness of the graphic visualizations we would like to add, that there is another reason for mentioning W. G. Sebald in the context of our study. The German author's resort narratives, where intertextuality is often considered to be the main feature, quite unambiguously refer the reader to their “pretexts”, which are the corresponding `“resort” works of Jean Paul, Anton Chekhov and Alain Robbe-Grillet (see Fig. 1). This explicit quotation in Sebald adds unexpectedly, but quite distinctly, volume to the spa-narrative map of the preceding century, drawing out the multidirectional connections of its segments, making it three-dimensional, transforming the map -- into a complexly organized network. Thus, the line “Sebald -- Chekhov” allows us to realize a complex vector to British pretexts (see Fig. 2), if we bear in mind the passion of the author of “The Lady with the Dog” for the work of Maupassant (“Mont-Oriol”), who in turn was an attentive reader of Turgenev during the latter's European fame (“The Smoke”), linked in turn to Lermontov, author of a significant Russian resort text (“A Hero of Our Time”) oriented to Walter Scott's “St. Ronan's Well”.

Conclusion

The first network-specific approach to the structure of the European spa narratives has led to three conclusions that are considerably important for further research of this problem.

Firstly, the network provided as an example has been composed of a total of fifteen selected frame narrators (nodes) from Europe and the relationships between them (ties). Assessing their density and direction to get an insight into the structure of the literary network, we made conclusions about the specific developmental dynamics of this narrative genre.

Secondly, the network analysis of this structure helped to realize the importance of the two lines, starting from Smollett and Scott.

Thirdly, our analysis has shown that Turgenev and Sacher-Masoch were the next most important authors (actors, nodes) who raised the genre-invariant towards the formation of a “growing hero” (a “man in the process of becoming”) who in the typical situation for the spa-legelized deviation chooses his destiny (life).

Sources

1. Austen 1803 -- Austen J. Northanger Abbey.

2. Chekhov 1899 -- Chekhov A. The Lady with the Dog.

3. Robbe-Grillet 1961 -- Robbe-Grillet A. L'annee derniere a Marienbad. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1961. Scott 1823 -- Scott W. St. Ronans Well.

4. Smollett 1771 -- Smollett T. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker.

5. Turgenev 1872 -- Turgenev I. The Torrents of Spring.

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