Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917 by Anne Lounsbery

Abstract

Reviewed by: Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917 by Anne Lounsbery Valeria Sobol Anne Lounsbery. Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917. NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Ithaca, NY: Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2019. xi + 344 pp. ISBN 978-1501747922. This innovative and rich study explores the way provinces and provinciality are portrayed in Russian literature throughout its long nineteenth century in the context of Russian imaginative geography and Russia's perennial preoccupation with its authenticity and national identity. The scope of the book is impressively broad, covering a wide range of authors and texts, from well-known classics (Pushkin, Gogol, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov) to less canonical texts produced by women writers of the society tale genre (Gan and Zhukova, for example), regionalists (Mel´nikov-Pechersky and Leskov), as well as travel writers and literary critics. The source of the book's conceptual strength, in my view, lies in the fact that it does not take for granted what might seem to be an obvious fact—the ubiquity of the province trope in Russian literature—but instead interrogates and explores its assumptions and, as a result, produces a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of this phenomenon. This fresh approach to the literary portrayals of the provinces stems at least partly from the author's comparativist perspective, which enriches and informs her examination of the Russian tradition. The contrast drawn with American regionalist writing (e.g., literature on the South), the specificity of the regions in Jane Austen's novels, and the relative concreteness of the settings of French realism (despite a similar obsession with the ultimate center, Paris, in this case) highlights the peculiarity of the generic Russian treatment of the province trope and invites a deeper look at the implications of its persistent presence in Russian literature—a task that Lounsbery performs superbly throughout the book. "Imaginative geography" is one of the key conceptual frameworks for this study. Lounsbery makes it very clear that she is not concerned with the reality of provincial life, although she does draw on important historical developments that affected, to a degree, its literary representations (e.g., Catherine II's project of standardizing the structure of the Russian Empire and eighteenth-century urban planning initiatives). Instead, this book focuses on the image, or trope, of the province, which proved remarkably stable throughout the century. The book's introduction presents a nuanced and multifaceted, if bleak, picture of what the Russian province stands for in the Russian literary imaginary. Invariably opposed to a largely imagined and almost always illusory center, the provinces [End Page 199] stand for everything the center supposedly is not: they represent a lack of meaning, illegibility; homogeneity (as expressed in the dull sameness of the generic provincial town lamented by many a Russian writer); profound inauthenticity, borrowed culture; emptiness, often paradoxically combined with thick but incoherent materiality, as is the case with Gogol's (chapter 4) and Saltykov-Shchedrin's (chapter 11) provinces—all of this along with a painful awareness that they are not the center and a no-less-painful desire to be like it. As Lounsbery continues to emphasize, moreover, the provinces trope is just as much about time as it is about space: the provinces are consistently portrayed as fundamentally opposed to modernity, lacking history, and being "stuck" in time. Due to its close association with backwardness and its constant struggle to be in step with time, the very notion of provinciality, as the book reminds us, is a quintessentially modern phenomenon. The Russian intellectuals' obsession with the provinces, as the author ultimately argues, reflects their own sense of cultural anxiety about being backward and provincial vis-à-vis the West, from which they import institutions, fashion, and, most importantly, ideas. Although much of the book's analysis is predicated on binary oppositions, such as "provinces" vs. "capital/center" or "Russia" vs. "the West," the author also critically interrogates these binaries. In an excellent chapter on Gogol, for example, Lounsbery demonstrates Gogol's tendency to endow the Russian capital with the emptiness and unintelligibility usually reserved for the...