The Provinces in Russian Fiction John Randolph Anne Lounsbery, Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917. 360 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. ISBN-13 978-1501747922. $33.95. At the beginning of the 18th century, Peter I and his advisers sought to transform the governance of the Russian Empire. They turned to examples drawn from other states and imported terminology for the new administration they planned. Some of this new vocabulary never made it far beyond the project stage (for example, the Swedish inspiration of calling a local military commander the landsgevding). The loanword guberniia, meanwhile, was a great success, used to describe the Russian Empire's largest units of administration (its territorial "governments") right through 1917. A middling fate awaited the kindred calque provintsiia. Employed in the Petrine era to create smaller, more manageable divisions (or provinces) within the gubernii, provintsiia was ultimately discarded by Catherine II. Catherine right-sized her territorial governments not by subdividing them but by shrinking them and increasing their number, thereby superannuating the original Russian "province."1 That might have been it for provintsiia, which could have shared the fate of many other imperial projects: to be given to the archive to be forgotten forever. Instead, as Anne Lounsbery shows in this wondrous and incisive study, a much grander destiny awaited "the provinces" in modern Russian culture. Life Is Elsewhere explores "the process by which nineteenth-century Russian writers imagined the provinces into being" (243), taking an abandoned administrative term of art and making it into one of the central tropes [End Page 167] of "Russian narrative art" (165). Though the cultural space occupied by the provintsiia inside Russian literature would come to be enormous—at times standing for all of Russia itself, and beyond that the still bigger global task of "figuring alienation in geographical terms" (243)—Lounsbery is admirably clear about the limits of her own project. She is quite aware that the province, though capacious, does not include everything. It does not represent (and, indeed, often serves to obscure) the diversity of the Russian Empire, as we might attempt today to reconstruct it through other sources. It draws around some territories and social groups, rather than including them. For good or ill, Lounsbery contends, peasants "are never provincials" in narrative fiction (playing instead the role of "the folk"). While fiction frequently visits the provincial "Town of N," made most famous by Nikolai Gogol´, it contains no memorable invocations of a "Village of N" (all villages have names, it seems, even the humblest ones). Imagined borderlands such as "the Caucasus" receive distinct exoticizing treatments, even as the empire's really existing gubernii are folded up into a common province trope (14–15, 21–22). Within literature, Lounsbery argues, the making of the province was also confined by generic boundaries. Poetry and drama, she contends, needed it less. Focused on internal worlds and intimate stages, these genres were happy to avoid or even mask their relationship to larger networks and hierarchies (of politics, of economy, of culture). Narrative prose—which depended more obviously on these structures for its print production and circulation—did "not have the option of pretending these systems do not exist" (20). Instead, taking up the province as a central device, Russian fiction writers set about conjuring a vast middling world defined by its spatial and temporal relationship to some other center. As a result, as Lounsbery shows, the province with its capital in the proverbial "Town of N" became a sort of irreducible, universal variable (the constant pi) within Russian narrative prose, a magic number that authors could always use to solve all manner of chronotopographical equations. "Provintsiia takes on significance," Lounsbery writes, "because it meets a larger need": it "allows Russians to think about the consequences of centrality and peripherality more generally, and thus (eventually) about modernity and nonmodernity—all crucial issues at a time when educated elites are increasingly worried about their relationship to European ways of measuring both time and space" (56). How, then, did this trope come into being, and how did it develop across the 19th century? Lounsbery's book is organized chronologically. It starts "before the provinces...