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

Abstract

Slavonic and East European Review, 98, 3, 2020 Reviews Lounsbery, Anne. Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917. NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London. 2019. xi + 334 pp. Map. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 (paperback). The opposition of the provinces vs. the capital has become so commonplace in the Russian cultural imagination that it has ceased to be of much interpretative use. Anne Lounsbery’s excellent book demonstrates that a careful unpacking of the trope’s origins and development helps in understanding Russia’s perceptions of space and time, and its relationship with modernity. Lounsbery ‘deconstructs’ the powerful and persistent cultural cliché and shows how it came into being, why in Russia and in this particular time, and what it tells us about both parts of the opposition. In chapter one, Lounsbery sets the parameters of the argument and distinguishes between the literary treatments of the provinces (provintsiia), the village or countryside (derevnia), provincial town (gubernskii gorod) and gentry estate. She is interested in the image of the provinces in Russian mainstream literature. Almost always, this image is formed from the point of view of the centre and involves a particular set of concepts: backwardness, ineligibility, inauthenticity, imitation, repetition, materiality and excessive efforts not to appear provincial. The symbolic geography in which the provinces are thus defined invites consideration of how Russians perceive their own place in history, and what it means to be modern and not to be backward and provincial. The analysis begins with Pushkin (chapter 2) to demonstrate that the image, so familiar by the 1840s, was not ‘always there’, but rather invented by writers after Pushkin. In Eugene Onegin, the countryside is an intact, authentic culture, charmingly patriarchal and perhaps somewhat idealized. Tatiana is not provincial because she is effortlessly authentic, whereas the effort not to appear provincial would become a telltale sign in subsequent portrayals of provincials. Chapter three shows that by the mid-1840s, writers such as Ivan Dolgorukov, AlexanderHerzenandVladimirSologubdepicttheprovincesas‘aplaceatonce forbiddingly unknown and familiar to the point of banality’ (p. 57). The trope acquires its dimensions in imitation, unnaturalness, lack of taste, constraint and exhausting materiality. It becomes clear the capital in this dichotomy is less a real place than a point of view, from which everything in the provinces is identical and dreadfully boring. To employ the provinces vs. capital trope is to consider the problem of centrality and peripherality and, more generally, REVIEWS 561 of modernity and non-modernity. The material culture of the provinces is an especially interesting point that Lounsbery develops throughout the book: the piling up of incongruous details of provincial life generates the palpable sense of its thick absurdity. Not surprisingly, the book’s most interesting chapter is on Gogol´ (chapter 4). Gogol´ might have been the most important actor in the story of the provinces vs. capital opposition, but Lounsbery shows that he both built on the already existing trope and made explicit its most important dimensions. Yes, Gogol´ian provinces are homogeneous and undifferentiated, characterized by their inability to confer meaning on people and events. The thingness of his provincialsettings,fromembroideredpillowstoembroideredtoothpickholders, signals the absence of measure and taste. But most importantly, in considering the provinces, and being appalled by them, Gogol´ considers all of Russia, and finds it lacking in the very same ways: ‘the provinciality of the provinces can be seen to reflect the provinciality and perhaps even the “inauthenticity” of the nation as a whole’ (p. 80). Ivan Goncharov and Vissarion Belinskii (chapter 5) consider provinciality as an obstacle to becoming modern; for both, the capital is the only place where the process of becoming modern can approach completion. For Goncharov, the repetitiveness and predictability, usually associated with the provinces, are features of the urban setting; he thus views them as necessary and even positive in a very non-Gogol´ian way. Belinskii too considers provincialism a problem that could be cured by geographic means — a provincial who moves to the capital, gains access to a variety of cultural experiences and learns to discern the nuances of their cultural value has a...