Kleespies, Ingrid. A Nation Astray: Nomadism and National Identity in Russian Literature (review)

Abstract

SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 342 illuminates Bogatyrev’s theory through concrete examples. Bogatyrev’s lifelong interest in theatre — both avant-garde and folk theatre — was closely tied to his pioneering work in cultural semiotics. Both Veronika Ambros and Eva Šlaisová focus on Bogatyrev’s collaboration with the Czech avant-garde theatre director E. F. Burian. Šlaisová’s essay is particularly informative, and makes the insightful suggestion that Bogatyrev’s work on the transformation of ethnographic facts as they pass from one milieu to another can be understood as a type of intertextuality. The seven essays by Bogatyrev which conclude the book were selected to complement the conference papers, and include his best-known theoretical work from this period. All have been previously published, and most can be found in English translation, as well as in German, Russian and other Slavic languages. Pëtr Bogatyrëv et les débuts du Cercle de Prague contains new and important analyses of Bogatyrev’s ethnographic theory and his sources of inspiration. This book will be of use for specialists in Russian folkloristics interested in Bogatyrev, scholars of Prague School structuralism and semiotics, as well as for those looking for an introduction to Bogatyrev’s ethnographic theory. Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Jessica E. Merrill Stanford University Kleespies, Ingrid. A Nation Astray: Nomadism and National Identity in Russian Literature. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2012. x + 242 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $48.00. Itinerancy, Ingrid Kleespies argues in this stimulating monograph, emerged as a central element of the national identity formulated by the Russian literary and intellectual elite over the period from around 1790 to 1880. Fedor Dostoevskii drew attention to it in the momentous speech of 1880 in which he celebrated Russian distinctiveness as he thought it found expression in Pushkin: here the archetypal representative of the nation was depicted as a questing wanderer defined by homelessness, displacement and lack of fixity or purpose. Kleespies develops her thesis through a close reading of several works written during the literary golden age, beginning with the Letters of a Russian Traveller that arose out of Nikolai Karamzin’s journeying in the German lands, Switzerland, France and England in 1789–90 and ending with Dostoevskii’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, published in 1863. Petr Chaadaev’s first ‘Philosophical Letter’ (published in 1836) is a key work for her, inasmuch as it famously articulated the notion that Russians were figuratively nomadic. Even REVIEWS 343 before Chaadaev, though, the heroes of two of Aleksandr Pushkin’s southern poems, ‘The Prisoner of the Caucasus’ and ‘The Gypsies’, ‘driven from Russian society to the outer edges of the empire’, embodied the ‘crisis of rootless or peripatetic entrapment’, as in their search for freedom they crossed borders into ‘uncivilized’ space where they became yet more alone. In his autobiographical travelogue, A Journey to Arzrum (1836), Pushkin himself enacted the dilemma of the wanderer ‘at the border between home and away’ (p. 178). Somewhat to the reader’s surprise, Ivan Goncharov’s novel, Oblomov, and his travelogue, The Frigate Pallas, published in the years 1858–59, also yield rich material for exploration of the theme of Russian nomadism. Goncharov’s sedentary hero, for example, is portrayed by Kleespies as a wayfarer caught between the capital city and the rural heartland where the feudal estate is imagined as an idyllic organic community. Finally, Kleespies treats Aleksandr Herzen’s autobiographical magnum opus, My Past and Thoughts, written over the period 1852–67, as a vehicle used by this political exile not only to demonstrate to posterity his own role as an historical actor but also to enable Russians to think of themselves as a ‘nomadic antithesis’ to the peoples rooted in the dying civilization of the West and as, in that sense, revolutionary (p. 179). Nomadism, then, was a powerful topos in the literature and thought of a nation whose writers sensed that it was excluded from European civilization or confined to its margins. The figure of the nomadic wanderer ‘became a convenient symbol for Russian self-definition because it reflected anxiety on the part of an educated Russian elite over Russia’s perceived alienation from Europe and its seeming...