“There is Nothing There.” Dmitrii Danilov’s Travel Writing and the Lure of the Russian Provinces

Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s seminal study The Practice of Everyday Life, the author argues that Dmitrii Danilov’s travel writing (Twenty Cities, 2007-2009) reimagines Russia’s symbolic geography by destabilizing the traditional opposition centre – periphery. Rather than depicting the provincial world as either an absurd and horrid world, or as a repository of “true Russianness”, Danilov provides a “decentred” perspective on the provinces that asserts the uniqueness of each city he visits. The novel Description of a City (2012), however, resurrects the more traditional view of the provinces as a world of boredom and cultural lack. To analyse this development the article looks at the central figure of the sluggish traveller-narrator, the employment of “camera-eye narration” and other, mainly linguistic, devices that reaffirm the notion of the provincial city’s “namelessness” as one of its most defining characteristics.

Turning Romanticism on its Head: The Peripheral Symbolic Geography of Aldous Huxley and Ira Levin

Within the present paper, I aim to discuss how Aldous Huxley and Ira Levin have employed the peripheral symbolic geography of their two works (Brave New World and This Perfect Day) to articulate their debate between different sets of social values. Unlike other authors of negative utopias such as George Orwell or Yevgeny Zamyatin, neither Huxley nor Levin idealized pre-modern values. In order to highlight how the two articulated their views with the help of symbolic geography, I will also make use of Michel Foucault’s theoretical concepts of heterotopias, heterochrony as well as the ideas developed by the critics Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre in their seminal work Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity. My purpose is thus firstly to point out how and why Huxley and Levin divided the symbolic geography of their works in two parts as well as how they employed the Romantic critique of modernity. Secondly, I aim to show how despite using this analytical tool, they also employed symbolic geography with the purpose of turning the critique on its head, thus unveiling both its strong points as well as its shortcomings.

SPACE AND PLACE OF THE BALKANS: A GEOCRITICAL PERSPECTIVE

The literature that explores the representations of the Balkans is based on the assumption that the Balkans were constructed, imagined or invented. This claim is usually accompanied by the attempts to highlight the discrepancy between physical and imaginary geography and to point out the gap in semantics between the Balkan Peninsula and the Balkans. While the first one functions as physical geography, the other one refers to a place populated by representations, rather than people. Following the trend of linguistic and spatial turn, they hold the binary logic that insists upon the duality of the spatial. Some of the most important studies in this field can be read and interpreted as another in a series of texts about the Balkans. Thus, the aim of this paper is to: 1. Point out the places and passages where academic discourse on the Balkans separate physical and symbolic geography; 2. Highlight the political implications of this approach; 3. Suggest a geocritical aim that provides a sort of ballance between the material geography („real“) and imaginary spaces.

The Imagined Geography in the Philology of Erich Auerbach

The purpose of the author is to find the main motive why Auerbach chose to use the non-disciplinary term “European philologists” and what he meant by that. I argue that Auerbach’s consciousness of Europe as a historical entity was formed in the 1920s, but his exile turned this consciousness into a position. A basic question is about the symbolic geography of European culture in the works of Auerbach. The synonymous use of Europe and Abendland distinctly reveals Auerbach’s dual, unifying/divisive understanding of the identity and symbolic geography of European culture. If we accept the opinion that the European has been represented for centuries by the Romance, then the tasks of Romance philology as European philology will become clearer and the cultural geography of Europe narrower. The cultural-historical identification of Europe and Abendland after the Second World War solidified the anyway existing division of Europe in to two blocs. Literary history and philology divided Europe in the way this was done by the relevant political doctrines too. The human sciences also contributed significantly to the creation of value-attitudes, and an investigation of the former from this perspective gives us additional reason to assume that the agreement on the division of Europe after the Allied victory was not based solely on strategic interests.

Life Is Elsewhere

This book shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called “the provinces”—a place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. The book looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has exercised such enduring power, and what role it plays in the larger symbolic geography that structures Russian literature's representation of the nation's space. The book brings to light fundamental questions that have long gone unasked: how to understand, for instance, the weakness of literary regionalism in a country as large as Russia? Why the insistence, from Herzen through Chekhov and beyond, that all Russian towns look the same? In a literary tradition that constantly compared itself to a western European standard, the book argues, the problem of provinciality always implied difficult questions about the symbolic geography of the nation as a whole. This constant awareness of a far-off European model helps explain why the provinces, in all their supposed drabness and predictability, are a topic of such fascination for Russian writers—why these anonymous places are in effect so important and meaningful, notwithstanding the culture's nearly unremitting emphasis on their nullity and meaninglessness.

Centering and Decentering in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy

This chapter begins with a brief look at Leo Tolstoy's symbolic geography. His is an imaginary landscape that is by no means structured around a provintsiia/stolitsa binary and is thus an exception to the rule that is the subject of this book. The overview of Tolstoy serves as background to a closer analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky's geography, an analysis focused on Demons—a novel in which both the provintsiia/stolitsa binary and the trope of Russia's empty provinces take on great determinative power. If Dostoevsky at times recapitulates familiar images of the provinces, in Demons he also makes ideological use of them in ways that are strikingly original. He dwells on the essentialized difference between center and periphery in order to underscore how provincial isolation fosters a dangerous kind of intellectual vulnerability.

“Everything Here is Accidental”: Chekhov’s Geography of Meaninglessness

This chapter argues that, for Anton Chekhov, certain particularities of place matter in a way they often do not for other writers. It considers where, how, and how much. In other words, the chapter asks if Chekhov's provinces stand for the provinces, or if they stand for something else. A previous chapter has argued that for Gogol the provinces never really stand for the provinces, since his symbolic geography never allows us to imagine that a better life might be found in some other real place. But Chekhov's provinces, notwithstanding their clearly and even insistently symbolic import, are often locations that we could imagine pinpointing on a map of Russia: the specificities of place do matter in Chekhov's world, if in subtle ways. And perhaps most importantly, a place's meanings can change over time.