The theme of the image of a country in literature is one of the most significant and multidimensional in the humanities, especially in philology and cultural studies. In the context of globalization, intensified migration processes, transformation of national identity, and rethinking of the imperial legacy in the post-Soviet space, the concept of the “image of a country” becomes not only a scholarly category but also an instrument of cultural self-reflection. Literature, as an artistic model of the world, inevitably reproduces, interprets, transmits, criticizes, and rethinks the image of the state whether it is a real geopolitical entity or a mythologized territory. In this sense, the “image of a country” represents a synthesis of perceptions, myths, associations, archetypes, and symbols concentrated in a literary text and addressed to the reader’s consciousness.

The problem of the image of a country is of particular importance in the context of Russian literature and national literary studies. Russia, with its rich cultural, geographical, and historical complexity, has always been an object of close attention from writers, philosophers, poets, and publicists, as well as philologists striving to identify invariant structures of national self-understanding. In the Russian literary tradition, beginning in the 18th century, the image of the country has been inseparable from the search for a national idea, Russia’s destiny, its historical path, its place in the world, and its role in human history.