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 Muireann Maguire Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800-1917. By Anne Lounsbery. (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2019. xi+344 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-15017-4792-2. Anne Lounsbery's monograph, complementing recent scholarship on the literary representation of Russian peasants and country gentry by Alexei Vdovin (in various articles) and Bella Grigoryan (in Noble Subjects: 'The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762–1861 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018)) respectively, is a wide-ranging, occasionally provocative, survey of the concept of the provinces, and the nature of provincialism, in nineteenth-century Russian culture. She revisits familiar portraits of the provincial in works by Pushkin, Gogol′, Turgenev, Aksakov, Chekhov, and others, supplemented by comparisons with texts from less canonical or widely translated writers, including the Decembrist poet Kondratii Ryleev, the historical novelist Mikhail Zagoskin, Dostoevskii's contemporary Aleksei Pleshcheev, the so-called 'Russian Brontë' Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia, and Fedor Sologub (whose infamous 1907 novel The Petty Demon, with Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's 1880 The Golovlev Family, plausibly implicates provincial life in a nexus of filth, futility, and doom). In shaping the terms of her study, and in looking forward to twentieth-century discourses of provinciality in the work of Andrei Platonov and others, Lounsbery cites Iurii Lotman's notion of negatively valued space and cultural theorist Pascale Casanova's schemata of centre and periphery. Even T. S. Eliot and Sarah Palin unexpectedly mingle in her informed and discursive introduction, which posits the idea that Russian intellectuals' perception of the land beyond the nation's two capitals as amorphous, uncouth, and ineducable was analogous to their fear that Russia, as a political and cultural entity, lagged behind Europe in precisely the same way. Over twelve chapters, which transition smoothly between well-known and obscure primary sources, Lounsbery introduces and reviews the main literary tropes for representing Russia's regions: remoteness and irrelevance, backwardness and even timelessness, unintelligibility, and immorality. This is absorbing material, but her examination of Russian writers' mostly negative self-scrutiny is even more revealing. In Chapter 6, for example, she notes that Turgenev's novels appear to describe a Casanovan binary between stolitsa (capital) and provintsiia, centre and periphery. But his characters cannot solve their dilemmas by exchanging one locale for another: those who study abroad, such as the scientist Bazarov (from the 1862 novel Fathers and Children) or the eponymous hero of the 1848 short story 'Hamlet of Shchigrov', mysteriously fail to thrive when they return to apply their new skills in Russia's provinces. Lounsbery suggests that provinciality is an inborn, inalienable quality that prevents country bumpkins from reinventing themselves as convincing cosmopolitans: 'Indeed, for many of Turgenev's characters, a Europeanizing education lies at the root of the most grievously damaging forms of provincialism' (p. 120). Discussing Chekhov's 'Geography of Meaninglessness' in Chapter 12, Lounsbery shows how—despite the playwright's famous representation of Moscow [End Page 318] as a locus of progress and personal redemption in Three Sisters (1900)—much of his fiction hints that provincial stigma can taint Moscow too. Russia's capital, despite its promises to the contrary, may occupy the same continuum of meaninglessness and insignificance as Chekhov's many nameless country towns and decaying gentry estates. But Chekhov acknowledges (as Gogol′ does not) 'the possibility of change and movement' (p. 227); his Russia is backward but not static, and thus potentially capable of moving forward through time. One of Lounsbery's own most useful advances is in Chapter 7, focused on the provintsialki—provincial lady writers who published on marginal themes and created the subgenre which Catriona Kelly has termed 'the provincial tale' (p. 143). Sometimes the provincial tale was a female Bildungsroman, sometimes an 'escape plot' involving marriage or some other means of flight from indefinite rustication (p. 143). Lounsbery discusses the work of Elena Gan (whose early death caused her to be glamorized by male peers as a Romantic heroine in her own right); Maria Zhukova (a proponent of literary realism whose characters are markedly, and...