Anne Lounsbery begins her insightful, tour-de-force book on the Russian provinces with a discussion of Anton Chekhov's short story, “On Official Business.” Chekhov's bureaucrat in the story is not impressed by the suicide he has come to report, or the abject poverty around him, because ultimately these things are not occurring in Moscow, but in a godforsaken province. This unusual and yet deeply insistent geographical elitism in nineteenth-century Russian high culture is at the core of Lounsbery's monograph, which focuses on the term provintsiia (provinces). As Lounsbery points out, while Moscow and St. Petersburg have been extensively described in Russian literature, the Russian provinces have never been afforded such privilege or definition. The provinces, argues Lounsbery, have been rendered “mute, illegible, culturally barren, and indistinguishable from one another” (3). The provinces evoke immutability and a permanent, static backwardness that is not in the process of being transformed into something else. Yet as drab as the provinces may be imagined, Lounsbery's extraordinary book brings out in rich and intricate detail their significant cultural meaning in the Russian empire.
As the author points out at the outset, the book's topic is not the real, lived experience of the provinces, but rather the symbolic image of the provinces as constructed in mainstream Russian literary culture. Lounsbery uses the term provintsiia in the book fairly frequently and points out that the term entered the Russian language from Polish during Peter the Great's reforms. Originally, the term designated large territorial units within the Russian empire. However, during the late eighteenth century the administrative unit was replaced with the term guberniia. As Lounsbery suggests, once provintsiia lost its proper administrative meaning, it came to assume broader geographical connotations as a qualitative term that referred, largely pejoratively, to spaces outside St. Petersburg and Moscow. As Lounsbery puts it, “the meaninglessness of provintsiia might actually make possible the meaningfulness of the capital” (10).
To launch her argument in the opening chapter, Lounsbery contrasts Russian and American imagined geography. She suggests the American geographical model functioned as a grid, in which all parts were identical and all regions were equivalent. By contrast, the Russian geographical imaginary can be envisioned as a series of concentric circles, each feeding or emptying into a semantic center of meaning. Whereas in the American grid model all parts are equal and each part can represent the whole, within the Russian concentric model, the parts are subsidiary to the center. “One cannot get much further from America's relentlessly equalizing grid,” writes Lounsbery in illustrating the contrast, “than Russia's series of concentric circles radiating out from a single focal point” (7).
This binary between the capitals and the provinces, Lounsbery argues, was not disrupted by the largeness of the empire or the fact that it contained deeply heterogenous and often ethnically and racially heterogeneous borderlands. These other, “colonial” spaces were seen as being in opposition to Russia or less than Russia, and certainly the European others were readily collapsed into the idea of “the provinces.” The real others to the provinces were the peasants who never fit with the lack of authenticity that characterized the provinces.
For as much as Lounsbery's argument is meant to illustrate the ways in which the provinces are erased in Russian literature, few scholars have done more in recent years to engage with the meaning of the provinces in Russian literature, or truly looked at Russian provinces quite so closely. Along these lines, if Moscow and St. Petersburg are two central foci in nineteenth century Russian literature, this canon, at least where scholarship is concerned, has had its focal authors as well. It is here that Lounsbery's attention to provinciality and provincial voices should be praised from the outset. Rather than focusing on Lev Tolstoi, Fedor Dostoevskii, Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol΄, Ivan Turgenev, and Anton Chekhov, Lounsbery makes a concerted effort to bring into play other, more “provincial” voices, such as the provintsialki, or provincial women writers, or names like Vladimir Dal΄, Pavel Melnikov, Aleksei Pleshcheev, and many more.
She fittingly begins with a discussion of Pushkin, whose description of the provinces helps provide important contrast to other Russian writers. As she shows, the neutral, benign, if a bit condescending depiction of the provinces in Pushkin goes a long way toward illustrating the negativity that these spaces are later imbued with. Pushkin characterizes the provinces by “homey and reassuringly authentic Russianness, frequently tinged with affectionate irony” (34). Even so, we can already see slight hints of some of the later depictions in Pushkin's description of Goriukhino in the Belkin Tales.
Rather than jumping to Gogol΄ after Pushkin, Lounsbery takes time to explore a number of other in-between authors whose voices played a significant role in the understanding and imagery of the provinces, including Orest Somov, Vladimir Odoevskii, Dal΄, Pleshcheev, Vladimir Sollogub, Aleksandr Herzen, Kendraty Ryleev, Lavrenty Zagoskin, and others. She shows in the course of the extensive and erudite third chapter that the trope of provintsiia as a signifier of nameless and blank space did not originate with Gogol΄, even if he significantly connected the meaning of the provinces with broader questions of Russian identity. Authors like Herzen, Sollogub, Pleshcheev, Zagoskin, Ryleev and many others helped formulate an image of Russian provinces as grimly familiar. In fact, these authors went to some trouble to construct an image of the provinces as one that had been perpetually prevalent (it had not been!), thus hiding their own work of creation by pretending it had been a long-term stereotype.
Turning to Gogol΄ in Chapter 4, Lounsbery shows how the “provincial backwater becomes not just a recurring image but a governing trope of Russian literature” (79). As she argues, in the Gogol΄ian imagination, the category of provintsiia no longer merely constitutes simple narrowness and stasis, but rather becomes symbolically central to Russian identity and relevant in many works that follow. For Gogol΄, the provinces, as characterized in works like Dead Souls or The Inspector General, are not only empty and indicative of deep psychic void; they help him interrogate Russian identity as a whole, and exude discomfiting suggestions about the provinciality of Russian identity and the inauthenticity of Russia itself.
In Chapter 5, Lounsbery turns to Ivan Goncharov and Vissarion Belinskii, who were writing at a time when provintsiia had already been enshrined with some cultural permanence. She considers how both authors wrestled with the category and the idea of overcoming provinciality, seeing it as fluid, believing that readers could be trained not to be provincial. Turning to Turgenev in Chapter 6, Lounsbery acknowledges that he is a fundamentally cosmopolitan Russian writer, perhaps the most “European” of his peers. Yet Turgenev's European ties also did not make him into a writer who looked down on Russia or considered everything that was not explicitly European to be backward. In fact, it is often the most European of Turgenev's characters that display disturbing traits of provincialism. Preoccupied with inorganicism like many other Russian writers, Turgenev did not find centrality, typified by Paris and other capitals, as organic—for him, provintsiia typified the Russian struggle between being provincial and not, which gave away to a struggle not to renounce one's own identity in order to be something else.
In Chapter 7, Lounsbery engages with a range of women writers, called the provintsialki—the provincial ladies—who made a career out of writing about the provinces and were among Russia's more widely read authors for several decades. The authors in question are Elena Gan (1814–42), Mariia Zhukova (1805–55), and Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia (1824–89). Their goal, at a time when provincial identity was distinctly denigrated, was to prove that writers did not need to hail from the capital. These authors confronted the theme of provinciality and the limitations it placed on women's coming of age stories, in the process both confounding and reaffirming the image of provintsiia that Lounsbery explores. This partial rebellion against the trope of provintsiia is taken further by writers that Lounsbery discusses in Chapter 8, Pavel Melnikov (Andrei Pecherskii) and Nikolai Leskov, both of whom challenged the convention that the provinces were meaningless. Like the provintsialki, Melnikov and Leskov imagined geographies not organized around the provinces-capital divide and intentionally focused artistic attention on regional space (like the Volga region for Melnikov) or specifically decentered space through their poetics (in the case of Leskov).
The fact that Tolstoi and Dostoevskii only appear together in Chapter 9 tells us something about the intentional decentering of the canon that Lounsbery herself carries out in this book. Russia's two great giants could not be farther from each other in their reactions to the provinces. Dostoevskii is very much an author of the capital and his writings about the provinces only underscore his obsession with centrality. By contrast, Tolstoi, with his deep attachment to Iasnaia Poliana and general distaste for both capitals, would argue the opposite.
Chapter 10, on Chekhov, who is well-aware of the provintsiia image, shows just how tempting the trope was for any writer at the turn of the nineteenth century. Yet, despite his familiarity with the negative image of provintsiia as a blank, irrelevant space and his statements affirming this idea, Lounsbery argues that Chekhov still manages to construct his own brand of regionalism that shows the significance of specific places. Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and Sologub function as an appropriate end point for the book in Chapter 11, and a reflection of what Lounsbery calls “terminal provinciality,” in the sense that they focus on spaces so “fundamentally congealed in a mire of sticky provintsial΄nost΄” (229) that the possibility of narration and story feels impossible. This absolute negativity gives way to the concluding survey (Chapter 12) of the provinces in twentieth-century Russian literature. As Lounsbery provocatively notes, provintsiia easily lends itself to modernism's resistance of Russian byt and broader discussions of the place of Russian literature within the broader context of world literature. She notes that no matter how worldly and how broadly circulated Russian texts are, they are often excluded from the broader discussions of world literature and certainly from the western canon.
This is a magisterial book, generous in its wealth of information and citations, theoretically informed, thorough, and beautifully written. No matter how blank and uninteresting provintsiia may have been to some nineteenth-century authors, in her extraordinary effort to unearth this theme throughout Russian literature, Lounsbery has proven that the Russian provinces are in fact deeply interesting, both as a foil and as a broader vehicle for helping us grapple with challenges of Russian identity and Russia's place both in the canon of world literature and geopolitically in the world. If nothing else, Russia's recent militaristic adventures only affirm just how uncomfortable the Russian powers that be are with the reality that their country should be invisible or less than central to the world community.
