The article investigates the role of intertextual loan motifs in the poetics of mid-19^th century eastern travelogues, a sub-genre which was vigorously cultivated by many authors involved in the basic strategy of Russian nationalistic discourse – to rethink the multiple and diverse imperial territories as an integral and homogenous space. The popular imaginative perception of vast Siberian peripheries as faraway lands, a distant and almost irreal world characterized by social and ethnographic exoticism created a number of obstacles on the way of the a.m. rethinking. In terms of poetics and semiotics the prime aim of the author was to describe the “unknown” as “known” and “remote” as “close”. The inherent feature of old European travelogues was to “recognize” the described realities (correlating them with topoi of classical Greek and Roman geographies). This feature attains in the studied period a distinct literary mode. As an example Pavel Nebol’sin’s “Notes on the Way from St.-Petersburg to Barnaul” published in 1849 are analyzed in this article. Describing the everyday life of Siberians Nebol’sin introduces a number of intertextual allusions taken from Karamzin’s, Pushkin’s and Gogol’s oeuvres. Eventually the reader had to recognize Siberia mostly as “literature” rather than “geography”. The forming Russian tradition of literary classics becomes the poetic tool to “imagine” the Eastern periphery as the continuation of an integral national world.