Inga Vidugirytė’s study offers a stimulating exploration of several works by Nikolai Gogol΄ in the context of a nuanced discussion of the geographical imagination of Romanticism. The methodological scope of the book, which draws as much on literary studies as it does on visual culture scholarship (Martin Jay, Jonathan Crary), as well as the multiple richly-articulated cultural and historical contexts in which Gogol΄’s cartographic imagination and writerly practice are placed, invite a generative recalibration of what may be termed the geographic impulses of Russian romanticism.

The book begins with a detailed and multi-faceted explication of Gogol΄’s “Some Thoughts on the Teaching of Geography to Children,” which was published in The Literary Gazette and has received, relatively speaking, little critical attention. Vidugirytė helpfully provides the full text, which would have been somewhat difficult for the reader to find, as it has been supplanted by the commonly anthologized “Thoughts on Geography,” which Gogol΄ produced a few years later. The main body of the volume is divided into two parts. The first surveys what may be called the history of the discipline, focusing on key concepts in romantic geography, as they might have been accessed by Gogol΄. Chapter 1 traverses the relevant ideas of Johann Gottfried von Herder, Carl Ritter, Friedrich Schelling, and Alexander von Humboldt that helped shape the core of the new geography that became available to Russian (and, of course, European) romanticism. Chapter 2 provides the Russian context for the new geography, relying chiefly on the periodicals produced by Nikolai Polevoi and Mikhail Pogodin, The Moscow Telegraph and The Moscow Herald, respectively. Moreover, we learn, for example, that Vasilii Zhukovskii's “authoritative knowledge” (73) of the ideas of Herder (chiefly), Ritter, and Humboldt may have prompted Gogol΄’s exploration of the new geography. Vidugirytė also identifies the likely sources for the orientalist correlations between culture and geography discussed by Gogol΄. Chapter 3 moves between the conceptual frameworks of the map and the landscape in comparing two versions of Gogol΄’s article with a focus on geographical vision.

Each chapter in the second part of the book contains a detailed and engaging reading of a passage drawn from one of Gogol΄’s works. In each of these chapters, aspects of what the author calls “a repertoire of scopic regimes of modernity” (after Martin Jay)—“Italian perspectivism, the cartographic observation that was characteristic of map-like Dutch landscapes in the seventeenth century, and baroque vision” (33)—prove central to understanding Gogol΄’s geographic imagination. Chapter 4 examines perspective in Gogol΄’s Ukrainian Tales, with a focus on “The Terrible Vengeance,” to explore the author's cartographic impulse as well as its sources. Chapter 5 turns to Taras Bulba and a textured explication of Gogol΄’s steppe in relation to a number of possible interlocutors, from Humboldt to Adam Mickiewicz. Chapter 6 reads a landscape in Volume Two of Dead Souls in terms of competing representational paradigms and in relation to Peter Pallas's Puteshestvie po raznym provintsiiam Rossiiskogo gosudarstva. The Afterword includes a fascinating reading of “Rome” that foregrounds forms of observation, as well as some concluding comments about “the theme of geographic vision and its optics in Gogol's work” in the context of “the nineteenth century's greatest passion, the desire to see everything with one's own eyes (235).” Ultimately, throughout this book, Gogol΄’s scopic and geographic impulses are shown to be startlingly modern, both in the nineteenth-century context and beyond.

Fittingly for a book so richly concerned with visuality, the volume is beautifully produced. It features a range of different images, including maps that help the author tell her story. Of particular note is the author's collaboration with the contemporary graphic artist Giedrius Jonaitis, who has produced a variety of images based on specific passages that are interpreted in the course of the study; in the book's afterword Vidugirytė writes helpfully about the nature of this collaboration and the ways in which her ongoing dialog with the artist shaped her readerly practices.

This well-researched, highly engaging, and thoroughly insightful book, which is available both in Russian and in English translation, will be of interest to scholars who work on Gogol΄, romanticism, visual culture, and cultural history.