The Divisive Modern Russian Tourist Abroad: Representations of Self and Other in the Early Reform Era

Abstract

Taking methodological cues primarily from James Buzard's bookThe Beaten Track(1993), Susan Layton examines the socially divisive construction of the Russian tourist abroad in mainstream writings published in Russia between 1856 and 1863. It was during this early reform era that Russians first began publicly worrying aboutturistyandturizmas components of their national culture. The prism of divisiveness complicates a scholarly tendency to interpret the production of imperial Russian travel narratives as a nation-building enterprise from the eighteenth century onward. Although nationalist sentiments persisted in early reform public discourse concerning leisure travel, writers also fissured the nation along lines of social estate, gender, education, cultural competence, and moral values. Layton's comparative approach establishes parallels between snobbish nineteenth-century English and Russian views of ill-prepared “crowds” of tourists abroad but underlines Russian convictions that all Russian travel to western Europe should pursue educational and moral benefits.