Imagine a time of political chaos and looming danger, when all that one took for granted is upended, when all that was familiar becomes eerily strange, when home becomes the uncanny space of “not home.” Imagine that in such conditions, people who always considered themselves rooted in place start urgently weighing the pros and cons of leaving their country, taking refuge abroad. Edith Clowes published Shredding the Map in 2024, when her point of reference in the contemporary world was Vladimir Putin’s Russia and his war of aggression in Ukraine. In the brief time since she submitted the manuscript, many Americans have found themselves similarly in a world “made strange,” unexpectedly confronting whether the time has come to flee. Clowes’s book is not meant as an allegory for our time. It is, rather, a serious engagement with the literature of the Russian Civil War. Her findings are sobering, nonetheless. Of the ninety writers in her data base, many fled the country. Of those who remained, or the few who returned after a period in emigration, at least twenty, that is 22% of the entire sample, including those who emigrated, “were suppressed or committed suicide.” A grim chorus runs through the brief biographies of the writers provided here: “arrested in 1937,” “shot in 1938.” Since reading the book, I find myself thinking about it incessantly and pondering the grim questions it raises.

Unnerving resonance to today’s world aside, the book is an extraordinary, bold, and creative effort to explore the possibilities of the digital for expanding traditional literary analysis. Shredding the Map offers a history of Russia’s “literary Civil War” that foregrounds the emotional valences attached to imagined geographies in the writings of literary figures high and low, familiar and unknown. The discussion brings the idea of emotional regimes—that is the public expression and performance of emotion, rather than interior “feelings”—into conversation with the political history of the tumultuous years of the war. The novel pairing of affective and spatial imaginaries illuminates the ways in which Russian authors reconfigured the geographies of their hopes and ambitions, and of their resentments and losses. Whether preoccupied with borders and external threats or with cities, buildings, or natural landmarks, their literary uses of space tell a great deal about the commitments that motivated and mobilized them.

Clowes, who is Emerita Brown-Forman Chair in the Humanities Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia, has thought long and productively about spatial imagination. Her 2011 book, Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity, already placed her at the forefront of the field. In the current work, she pushes beyond the already interdisciplinary methodology of that book with a deep dive into Digital Humanities. Clowes collaborated with a team of graduate students to code every reference to a place that they found in the works of ninety writers working on Russian territory in the years of the Civil War, defined as 1914–22. These places range from the specific and highly localized (a particular factory, a marketplace, or house) to the abstract or even intangible (Rusʹ, home, paradise, hell), with rich possibilities in between (the Volga, the border, Siberia). These “multivalent markers (MMs)” refer to all “textual spatial images carrying emotion, whether mappable or not (xii).” The team further coded place references as “place-based components (PBCs).” PBCs encode various aspects of the place as invoked in the text: “the type of place, place scale, political inclination, and emotional valence (xi).” After entering all of these components into a data base, Clowes generated complex graphs that trace connections between certain kinds of places and a palette of emotions expressed in the works of individual authors or groups of authors.

The graphs reveal remarkable patterns: stark differences in emotional valence and even in the kinds of places included by writers of different political persuasions, and markedly different patterns of orientation toward time, borders, and the future. There are some predictable findings: Bolshevik and Bolshevik-adjacent authors expressed more hope for the future and extolled the factory floor as a generative space of action and of joy. Pro-tsarist and nationalist writers formulated darker visions. During the unregulated years of the Civil War, regionalists, particularly in Siberia and the Volga region, offered contrasts to both Red and White visions by playing up the particularities of their regions and their natural environments. These regionalist alternatives would quickly be silenced, but they resurfaced in the later twentieth century, especially in Siberia. There are also some real surprises. For instance, Bolsheviks and their sympathizers invoked religiously infused spatial concepts such as paradise and heaven more than their White counterparts. Pro-tsarists writers defined their imagined Russia by its borders, not by its internal space, which was evoked mostly in vaguely configured generalities. As Clowes explains, among such writers, “Fervent professions of loyalty to ‘hallowed Rusʹ’ disguises a rather poor, indeed ‘hollow’ appreciation of actual Russian geographical place” (29).

She deserves recognition for her courage and imagination in wading into digital waters, and the payoff is evident. She gains, as she says, “substantial volume and interpretive enhancement to traditional textual interpretation (15).” The project leverages the digital to perform what Franco Moretti calls “distant reading,” that is, viewing literary works collectively in order to discern patterns otherwise obscured in any individual text. The book reaches four major conclusions. First, the revolutionary period profoundly shifted and reconfigured geo-emotional perceptions of space. Second, literary campaigns were effective in winning readers over, and the Bolsheviks were far more effective on this front than their rivals. This finding is an important reminder of the potential power of the written word. Third, regional geographic imaginaries flourished in the tumult of the Civil War and then reemerged in the late twentieth century. And finally, digital analysis can reveal otherwise unseen patterns and can substantiate claims on a broader basis and using solid data of a type rarely used in literary analysis. In the end, the digital analysis makes visible the ways that physical spaces became imbued with meaning.

The book includes many figures that are meant to display the data in accessible ways. The figures illustrate connections between authors or groups of authors, the places they invoke in their texts (MMs), and the emotional valence attached to those places (PBCs). For instance, Figure 5.3 illustrates pro-revolutionary approaches to “uncanny Russia,” the idea of the unheimlich introduced above. Color-coded lines track each individual author’s emotional association (PBC) with a given geographic place, (MM). In Sergei Esenin’s writing, for instance, Clowes’s collaborative team identify frequent occurrences of the theme they label “rejection of patriarchy.” The graph reveals that Esenin often associated that theme with “Rusʹ.” Aleksandr Blok’s most common PBC, by contrast, is labeled “welcoming violence,” a theme geographically located in his writings in Asia, Russia, or “the East,” while Maksim Gorʹkii dwelled on the theme of “alienation,” which he linked to the concept of dom and zemlia (home and land, earth). The publisher was generous in printing the figures in color, but unfortunately, they are presented with tiny, illegible graphics, labeled in miniscule font. Since their meaning is already complex, the visual hurdles add to the difficulty of decoding them. On their own, the figures are difficult to figure out or even to read, and some defied my efforts and comprehension. Fortunately, in the text, Clowes parses these tables, pulling meaning from the various associations of place and emotional register. Her brief but insightful close readings of a few representative texts in each chapter help illustrate her points.

An intriguing website accompanies the book, allowing users to interact directly with the data, the texts, and the graphs. The figures are more legible in the web resource, where one can enlarge them and zoom in as needed. The attractively designed website has marvelous information on all ninety authors and all the places referenced in their work. The site welcomes clicking with abandon, and promiscuous searching pays off. Clicking on “Place Based Concepts” summons a complete list. Selecting any one of them—“pan-Orthodox unity,” for instance, or “rejection of idylls”—leads to a list of all the works included in the data base that invoke that concept in their work and a catalogue of all the geographic markers associated with that emotional state. Many of the works are linked to the texts themselves, making the primary material available. One can choose instead to search by author, where one encounters a list of relevant works and some biographical information. Not all of the information is yet live on the site, but it will grow with time. Some of the search functions are slow or inoperative, and navigating the site and its figures can be difficult. We still have a long way to go in marrying the digital and the humanities, but this is a valiant foray and pays off richly.