Tourist guide : semiotic sketch of an imaginary trip to Russia

This article adopts a critical discourse analysis to examine the image of Saint Petersburg in guidebooks, magazine articles, publications on travel portals. The starting point of the article is a theoretical background which presents the main issues of semiotics of tourism. Subsequently, the analysis of each type of text is provided starting with a short characteristic of the genre. The author examines a few questions in particular: how the image of Saint Petersburg, Russia and Russian is constructed, what are the purposes of such constructions, how this varies across different types of tourist publications. It should be stressed that each narrative influences the so called “tourist gaze”, therefore, better understanding of tourist literature may help to understand tourists’ expectations, motivations and, finally, behaviour