Breaking Ground: Travel and National Culture in Russia from Peter I to the Era of Pushkin by Sara Dickinson (review)

Abstract

552 SEER, 86, 3, JULY 2008 most are too general to be of practical use. Any future edition should provide theatre maps showing places mentioned in the text, troop movements etc., as well as a regular bibliography in lieu of the brief listof books in English. Nevertheless this textbook ? the firstto appear in fortyyears ? should prove invaluable to students, while specialists, too, will learn a great deal. Bern, Switzerland John Keep Dickinson, Sara. BreakingGround:Travel and National Culture inRussiafromPeter I to the Era of Pushkin. Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics, 45. Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2006. 291 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 60.00: $75.00 (paperback). This well-written study treats the literary record fashioned by Russian travel lers at home and abroad. In the early eighteenth century, Petrine courtiers saw travel largely as an educational and fact-finding experience. The first chapter considers accounts indiary and epistolary formby Boris Kurakin, and his later namesake Aleksandr Kurakin. It moves on to analyse Fonvizin's notoriously curmudgeonly performance inhis Letters fromFrance. InDickinson's view, their tone and viewpoint are performance features of a literary persona constructed by a skilled comedian. This is arguable, since Fonvizin's later lettersand spa diaries, also treated helpfully here, are ostensibly less literary in nature and stillno less bilious about France, suggesting that there is less artifice and more authenticity to his persona. Chapter two treats Radishchev in the context of other domestic travel accounts of Russia, and examines the balance between sentiment and social criticism. Dickinson's conclusion about theJourney fromPetersburgto Moscow is that the traveler's despair atwhat he sees is a process of enlightenment that turns him from being a mere sentimental man of feeling to a candid viewer of the external world committed to resolv ing problems caused by serfdom and corruption. A final sub-section takes a cursory look at Radishchev's wonderful letters from Siberia, explaining the problems that the absence of a tradition of literary description of Siberia posed. His solution was to cram these letterswith data, describing everything from geology to cottage industry.This unliterary emphasis in itselfbranded the letters with an authentic sense of Russianness by comparison with literary letters already associated with journeys to Western Europe. Chapter three moves on toKaramzin's famous text inwhich she explores how Karamzin negotiates between Russian and European cultural frameworks, paying particular attention to Karamzin's Russian models, including Fonvizin ? whose travel writings Karamzin may not have known, as Dickinson concedes. The distinctive emphasis in this chapter ison Karamzin's Sentimentalist rhet oric, and on his penchant for domestic scenes. Dickinson is content to repeat a standard claim about the influence of Laurence Sterne on Karamzin, but the connection is only superficially obvious and needs by now either to be explained or dropped. The final two chapters extend the narrative as far as the late 1830s, encompassing works written during the Napoleonic campaigns by Fedor Glinka and Konstantin Batiushkov and Pushkin's critical rewriting REVIEWS 553 of Radishchev's main work; it ends with a consideration of Zhukovskii's Siberian diary. This book has its origins in a 1995 doctoral thesis. It is perhaps regret table that in revising the author was unable to take into account more recent work, since this is an area in which advances have been made and worthwhile arguments about the shape of the Russian Enlightenment are happening. In particular, not engaging with Andreas Schonle's account of the same corpus of texts (Authenticity andFiction in the Russian Literary Journey, iygo-1840, Cambridge, MA, 2000) seems like a missed opportunity to underscore the difference in these two complementary studies. But its value lies, above all, in the comprehensive coverage it gives to the canonical texts of Russian travel writing and more obscure works. Throughout Dickinson is attentive to the tension between the prescriptive nature of travel writing, which combined the utilitarian function of the travel guide, and itsother functions as a narra tive of personal growth and, most importantly forDickinson, a statement of national pride inRussia's achievement of parity with theWestern countries encountered by these writers. BreakingGroundhas littlenew to say about any of its constituent texts, but it offers a comprehensive account...