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.

Back Home: The Provincial Lives of Turgenev’s Cosmopolitans

This chapter explains how Ivan Turgenev's oeuvre forms a crucial part of the provincial trope, with its focus on the relationship between provintsiia and the problem, or the hope, of a specifically Russian temporality. When Turgenev is writing about Russian space, he often seems to be thinking just as much about Russian time, often posing or implying the question, “Is Russia 'behind'?” Analyzing spatial relationships in his texts reveals how these relationships condition ways of thinking about historical time (what counts as ahead and what counts as behind, for example). In Turgenev's view, it seems, Russia is not “modern,” but it is not simply “backward,” either. Hence his focus on the gentry estate: estates were places where Russian elites could work to rethink their relationship to historical time, moving beyond the assumption that centers (capitals) are ahead and peripheries (provinces) are behind.

“I Do Beg of You, Wait, and Compare!”: Goncharov, Belinsky, and Provincial Taste

This chapter considers first Ivan Goncharov's An Ordinary Story and then works by Vissarion Belinsky. It analyzes what provinciality and the provinces signify for these writers, both of whom are concerned with how Russia might work to develop a coherent (literary) culture. Both pay close attention to the processes by which one goes from being provincial to being not provincial, an attention reflecting their shared belief that readers and other consumers of culture need to be trained. While both focus on acquirable tools and skills, they are interested not in static canons of taste but in how exactly Russians might articulate standards of judgment that can be disseminated, learned, and revised as necessary—and they see such standards as key to becoming nonprovincial. Their underlying assumption is always that readers' capacity for discernment—the ability to distinguish good from bad, or bad from worse—is something that will either be learned or not learned, either fostered or impeded, depending on conditions.

Inventing Provincial Backwardness, or “Everything is Barbarous and Horrid” (Herzen, Sollogub, and Others)

This chapter considers not only how a new image of the Russian provinces took shape in literary texts. But it also looks at how these texts insisted that the image was old. By the 1830s, not only is it assumed that the provinces epitomize all that is grimly familiar, it is further assumed that such has always been the case, and that everyone has always known it. In the texts analyzed here, the supposedly timeless, ahistorical nature of provintsiia becomes both a stereotype and a preoccupation. And in a slightly later period, this is the image of provintsiia that will come to serve as a static non-modernity against which other forms of time and historicalness take on value.