Journeys to a Graveyard: Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing (International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idees)

306 Pages·2006·1.16 MB·English

by  Derek Offord

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
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or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception
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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,
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