This dissertation addresses the interdependence between vision and travel, between the process of sightseeing and its literary representation in late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Russian and Bulgarian texts about travel to Western Europe. It situates the travel writing of Nikolai Karamzin (1766-1826), Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), and Konstantin Velichkov (1855-1907) in the context of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour and its affiliated practices and texts. More specifically, the dissertation examines sightseeing as a key element of the travel account and explores the figurations of the traveler's vision and the visual strategies he employs in encountering and describing the Grand Tour sights.

I argue that within the framework of the Grand Tour, travel writing licenses navigation of the complex relationship between the Slavic world and Europe. By transforming the West into an object of scrutiny, Karamzin, Dostoevsky, and Velichkov negotiate their own positions of authority and effectively subject Europe to the Russian or Bulgarian gaze. The Slavic traveler as a viewer at once embraces and resists the Grand Tour scenario, engages its conventions and appropriates them for his own ideological purposes. Furthermore, the dissertation seeks to define and elaborate a Slavic rhetoric of vision informed by the figure of ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual representation, as the master trope of literary sightseeing.