Навигация, море и впечатления об Адриатике в воспоминаниях русского офицера

The article intends to investigate human events and natural phenomena, focusing in particular on the sea element and on the atmospheric conditions of the enterprise the Admiral Senjavin's men have been through on a mission on the Adriatic Sea in the first half of the year 1806. The study is carried out on the material of the 1836-1837 edition of the Memoirs of a second lieutenant of the Russian Navy, who took part in it, V. B. Bronevskij. The narration moves on different levels: on one hand, if the diary is a precious source of events and echoes of history, on the other, the author's voice emerges in the generous descriptions of the geographic-naturalistic horizon, in the stories with an ethnographic, botanical, physical, artistic, human and psychological taste, coming out in his sailing tales. The diary, therefore, turns up to be worth not only in its documentary and historical source, but rather in its literary and ethnographic pages. The search leads to the conclusion that sailing is a revealing experience of life in all its manifestations and that sea is for him a mystery of true knowledge, misterium cognitionis.