Journeys to a Graveyard: Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing by Derek Offord (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 709 irrational for the reader brought up on literature of a gothic persuasion, whereas the reverse was true in an age of positivism. A question that is not asked iswhether the fictional elaboration of the fantastic ismore pronounced in the earlier or the later decades of the nineteenth century. One reason for this omission is that the 'largely universal' (p. 11) reader whom the author invokes does not belong to the nineteenth century at all, but is rather a contemporary of hers, who views the past through twenty-first-century eyes and iswell-read in such theorists as Jauss and Hutcheon. All the same, every reader comes to a textwith an established idea of what reality is and, in takingup a fantastic story, isprepared to see that idea challenged. Dostoevskii, one of thewriters discussed in the volume, recognized the truth of this in giving the sub-tide 'A Fantastic Story' to his late novella, The Meek One {Krotkaia,1876). This first-personnarrative, inwhich the homodiegetic voice recounts events that have happened in the immediate past, 'assumes', as Whitehead comments (on p. 83 a propos Le Horld), 'a heightened symbolic resonance'. Dostoevskii introduced his storyby asserting that the fantastic is real. He was quick to add, however, that this identification of the fantastic and the real was achieved principally as a result of the form of the story.This is a proposition which Whitehead, on the evidence of her detailed investigation into the structural features of eight distinct fantastic texts of the nineteenth century, would surely endorse. Department ofLiterature, Film, andTheatre Studies Leon Burnett Universityof Essex Offord, Derek. Journeys to a Graveyard: Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian TravelWriting. International Archives of theHistory of Ideas, 192. Springer, Dordrecht, 2005. xxvi + 287 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 90.00: $109.00: ?69.00 Derek Offord's Journeys to a Graveyard concerns itselfwith Russian travel narratives toWestern Europe between r6g7 and r88i, with an emphasis on theperiod from the late 1830s to the 1860s,when theRussian travelogue came into its own, resting on a domestic frame of reference, rather than emulating Western models of the genre and echoing Western literary descriptions of places, as it did during the Sentimentalist and early Romantic periods. Offord's study thus nicely complements Sara Dickinson's Breaking New Ground (Amsterdam and New York, 2006), with which it shares an interest in the development of national identity,but which also includes domestic travelling and stops in 1850, and with my own Authenticity andFiction in the Russian Literary Journey (Cambridge, MA, 2000), which adopts an even earlier end point and preoccupies itself more with parallels between a quest for new literary form and that for a new social order. Referring to Said's Orientalism, Offord seeks to reveal the self-referential coherence and interdependency of this genre, its reliance on stereotypes (including ethnic and social ones) that are uncritically recycled from text to text. He assumes and often demonstrates that his writers have read one 710 SEER, 86, 4, OCTOBER 2008 another, and he throws into relief the foundational importance of Fonvizin's and, to a lesser extent, Karamsin's travel narratives for mid-nineteenth centurywriters. His protagonists come from various political quarters: Pogo din's Official Nationalism could not be at a greater variance with Herzen's Socialism, nor does Dostoevskii's Native-Soil Conservatism share much with Saltykov-Shchedrin's Westernism, yet, despite their ideological differences, these writers, and this constitutes the central thrust ofOfford's book, come together in a critique ofWestern Europe. The bourgeoisie as a social class is in for a devastating indictment, but the travellers' dissatisfaction with the West reaches more broadly: theyhave little sympathy for themodern city,become impatient with liberal institutions they see as ineffectual ifnot fatally under mined by the rule of money, condemn free Western sexual mores, and are generally incensed by the social inequities they observe. For many of these writers, Offord shows intriguingly, the journey to theWest becomes a paradoxical return to the homeland as their jaundiced disenchantment with Europe inspires them to develop a view ofRussia's distinctiveness, ifnot her superiority. The chapter on Petr Tolstoi's diary of his journey to Italy in 1697-99...