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Journeys to a Graveyard: Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing PDF

306 Pages·2005·1.83 MB·English
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JOURNEYS TO A GRAVEYARD ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D’HISTOIRE DES IDÉES INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 192 JOURNEYS TO A GRAVEYARD Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing By Derek Offord Founding Directors: P. Dibon† (Paris) and R.H. Popkin (Washington University, St. Louis & UCLA) Director: Sarah Hutton (Middlesex University, United Kingdom) Associate-Directors:J.E. Force (Lexington); J.C. Laursen (Riverside) Editorial Board: M.J.B. Allen (Los Angeles); J.R. Armogathe (Paris); A. Gabbey (New York); T. Gregory (Rome); J. Henry (Edinburgh); J.D. North (Oxford); J. Popkin (Lexington); G.A.J. Rogers (Keele); Th. Verbeek (Utrecht) Journeys to a Graveyard Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing By Derek Offord University of Bristol U.K. AC.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN-10 1-4020-3908-5 (HB) ISBN-13 978-1-4020-3908-9 (HB) ISBN-10 1-4020-3909-3 (e-book) ISBN-13 978-1-4020-3909-6 (e-book) Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AADordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springer.com Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved © 2005 Springer No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed in the Netherlands. In memoryof Dorothy Clare and Dorothy Joan (cid:3) (cid:3) (cid:3) (cid:3) I want to go to Europe, Aliosha, I’ll go from here. I do know that I’m only going to a graveyard, but it’s a precious graveyard . . . (cid:3) (Dostoevskii, The Brothers Karamazov, Book 5, Chapter 3) Contents Acknowledgements xi Note on dates, transliteration, names, references and translation xiii Foreword xv Introduction 1 The genre of travel writing: its history, terrain, poles and boundaries 1 Constructing national identity through travel writing 7 The Russian corpus of travel writing: journeys in Russia, in a borderland and abroad 13 Chapter 1. Piotr Tolstoi: a travel diary 25 Tolstoi’s life and journey 25 Tolstoi’s diary 28 A superficial tour of Western civilization 33 Types of difference in Tolstoi’s universe 41 Chapter 2. Fonvizin: letters from foreign journeys 49 Cultural westernization in the age of Catherine 49 Fonvizin and his Letters from France 53 Rejection of the “earthly paradise” 58 The journey to the German states and Italy 65 Chapter 3. Karamzin: TheLetters of a Russian Traveller 73 Karamzin’s life and work 73 TheLetters of a Russian Traveller: authorial craft and purpose 76 Switzerland 81 France 85 England 90 Russia 96 Chapter 4. Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 103 European politics and culture after the Napoleonic Wars 103 Russian intellectual life in the age of Nicholas I 108 Pogodin’s life, work and travelogue 119 Bourgeois society 125 Religion and politics 130 Russia and the Slavs 135 Chapter 5. Botkin: Letters on Spain 143 Botkin’s life and contribution to Russian thought 143 Romantic Spain 148 Affinities between Spain and Russia 154 Spain as lesson for Russia 158 Chapter 6. Herzen: Letters from France and Italy 167 Herzen and his place in Russian thought 167 Revolution and reaction in Europe in 1848-1849 170 Herzen’s Russian Socialism 174 Letters from France and Italy: genesis and genre 178 The world of the villainous bourgeoisie 181 The virtuous common people 188 Europe and Russia: between varieties of nationalism 190 Chapter 7. Dostoevskii: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions 197 The post-Crimean context 197 Between polemical journalism and fiction 201 The bourgeois world revisited 205 Europe, Russia and “Russian Europe” 210 Radical Westernism and Native-Soil Conservatism 215 Chapter 8. Saltykov-Shchedrin: Across the Border 221 Saltykov-Shchedrin and the contexts of his travelogue 221 Fact, fiction and topical comment in Across the Border 228 Prussia, and France again 231 Russia and her relationship to the west 239 After 1 March 1881 244 Conclusion 249 Bibliography 255 Index of names and subjects 265 Index of place-names 283 Acknowledgements This is a project that has been near to my heart for some years, crossing as it does boundaries between intellectual and literary history, exploring Russians’ thoughts on the place of their nation in European civilization as a whole, and indulging both my love of Russian culture and a passion for travel. The project builds on work published in the form of an article in The Slavonic and East European Review (SEER) in October 2000 on the travel writings of the eighteenth-century dramatist Fonvizin and the nineteenth-century novelist Dostoevskii. (I have drawn on this article in Chapters 2 and 7 of this book, and I thank the editors of SEER for allowing me to do so.) In the four and a half years since the publication of that article I have incurred many other debts of gratitude which it is a pleasant obligation to acknowledge now. I am grateful first of all to the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) for the award of a four-month Research Fellowship in the period October 2002 to January 2003. (AHRB awards have greatly enhanced opportunities for research in fields such as my own in recent years.) This award enabled me to complete the research that underpins this book. I am also grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Russian Studies at the University of Bristol for sheltering me from departmental duties during two further periods of research leave, one prior to the AHRB award, from February to May 2002, and one subsequent to it, for the same period in the current year. During the first of these periods of leave I was able to undertake the basic research for the chapters on Piotr Tolstoi, Karamzin, Pogodin, Botkin and Saltykov-Shchedrin. During the second period I have been able to deepen the examination of the context in which the travellers whom I examine were writing and to complete and thoroughly revise my manuscript. I am also much indebted to six scholars, four British and two American, who collectively have great expertise in the fields of seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature and intellectual history that I cover, namely Charles Ellis, Richard Freeborn, Gareth Jones, Max Okenfuss, Richard Peace and James Scanlan. Each of these scholars read the manuscript of the entire book in the form that it had taken by the academic year 2003-2004. Their erudite and constructive comments and advice have led, I am sure, to numerous improvements, xi

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