The article analyzes the ideological and artistic specificity of the Volga travelogue and highlights the urgent issues of its research. The attributive signs of travelogue are identified: Volga as an invariable and significant space-time locus, objectivity and documentality of the described “fact”, narrator as a permanent focus of the image, ethnography and folklore as characteristic features of poetics. The Volga travelogue represents a certain typological commonality, and in this aspect the following methods are most fruitful: structurally descriptive one, which allows us to reveal the dominant signs of “Journey through the Volga”, and comparative as the correlation of literary phenomena, as well as the comparative analysis of an artistic text. The study defined: the chronotope of the way, the spatial-geographical topos of the Volga is the structure-forming beginning of “Journey through the Volga”, the ethnography of the Volga is an important element of the ideological and artistic organization of travelogue. Other national phenomena in their ethnically ethnographic and confessional manifestation are the subject of the image in the Volga travelogue: wedding and funeral ceremonies of the Mordva, Tatar holidays, the German way of life and the Kalmyk world on the lower Volga – Buddhist temples and worship, rituals. The mythology and folklore of the ancient Volga – songs, historical legends, legends of Russian and non-Russian Volga peoples – are significant in the art system of the travelogue: Russian legends about the Dyatlovy Mountains, Sterlar Tsar, Svetloyar, St. Alexis and the Elder of Macarius, the god Yumo, the Kalmyks about the sacred mountain Bogdo, the Chuvash about Kiremet. Russians and other ethnic folk sources, revealing the historical memory of the Volga peoples, not only expanding the borders depicted phenomena, but also complicate the artistic travelogue system, introducing the image in the link of documentary, ethnically-ethnographic and art-figurative reflection. It is established that the image of other worlds is one of the narrative strategies of the Volga travelogue.