Noack on Dickinson, 'Breaking Ground: Travel and National Culture in Russia from Peter I to the Era of Pushkin'

H-Travel Noack on Dickinson, 'Breaking Ground: Travel and National Culture in Russia from Peter I to the Era of Pushkin' Review published on Thursday, March 1, 2007 Sara Dickinson. Breaking Ground: Travel and National Culture in Russia from Peter I to the Era of Pushkin. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006. 291 pp. $75.00 (paper), ISBN 978-90-420-1949-2. Reviewed by Christian Noack (Department of History, Universitaet Bielefeld, Germany) Published on H-Travel (March, 2007) Defining the Bounds of Europe and Russia Sara Dickinson's study of Russian travelogues written between the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is the first systematic attempt to analyze Russian travel writing. Against the backdrop of a growing interest in the history of travel and tourism in Eastern Europe, Dickinson's study fills an important gap in the field of literary studies. At the outset, Dickinson defines and explains her rather narrow criteria for the sample of travelogues upon which she draws. The most import criteria, she notes, is "literariness," meaning a travelogue's "evident link with the West and marked orientation towards Western European traditions" (p. 14). For the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this means that not only does Dickinson focus on well-known authors, like Denis Fonvizin, Alexander Radishchev, Nikolai Karamzin, Vilgelm Kiukhelbeker, Vasily Zhukovsky or Alexander Pushkin, but that she also chose only to examine works about travel to Europe. Consequently, Dickinson spends less time on travel accounts of journeys within Russia. In her short introduction, Dickinson initially defines travel writing as a highly stylized literary genre, which developed and circulated in early modern Western Europe. Russian writers, she claims, did not begin to adopt the genre until the latter half of the eighteenth century. Dickinson then locates travel writing in the broader context of Russia's "Westernization." She briefly discusses the role that travel writing played in the development of a "national consciousness," stressing how travelers' descriptions and explorations of cultural differences contributed to emerging notions about "the Russian." Travel writers increasingly juxtaposed "Russians" to West Europeans, above all to either "the Germans" or to "the French." Travel writing, Dickinson emphasizes, also helped to construct the "imaginary geographies" of the Russian Empire. Dickinson compares Russian travel accounts about travel to Western Europe with those accounts about travel within Russia. She concludes that travel to the West, and writing about it, provided Russian travelers with not only metaphors but also fundamental ideas about time, space and culture, which they, in turn, transferred onto their perception of Imperial Russia. The first chapter is divided into two parts. The first part describes the emergence of travel and the accompanying travelogues beginning during Peter I's reign at the turn of the eighteenth century and continuing into the beginning of Catherine II's reign, in the late eighteenth century. The second half of the first chapter is devoted almost entirely to Denis Fonvizin, the first Russian writer who had truly mastered the genre. As Dickinson shows, while Fonvizin's account of travels to France was firmly based on Western literary traditions, he also made fun of contemporary Russian Gallomania. Fonvizin Citation: H-Net Reviews. Noack on Dickinson, 'Breaking Ground: Travel and National Culture in Russia from Peter I to the Era of Pushkin'. H-Travel. 03-18-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/15531/reviews/15589/noack-dickinson-breaking-ground-travel-and-national-culture-russia Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Travel was thus the first Russian to make inventive use of the genre by turning the travelogue into an ironic critique of pro-European sentiments and to explore travel writing as a means of constructing "Russianness." The second chapter contrasts Catherine II's famous tours down the Volga and the Crimean Peninsula with Alexander Radishchev's vitriolic journey from Petersburg to Moscow. Without negating the original qualities of Radishchev's "Bildungsreise," Dickinson scrupulously places Radishchev's first famous domestic travelogue within the literary traditions of scientific expeditions and sentimentalism. Radishchev's text turns the journey into a psychological process and a public statement against the political and social conditions that persisted under Catherine's "enlightened despotism." The final section of the chapter deals with Radishchev's somewhat unknown diaries written during his Siberian exile. This section is a strong point in Dickinson's argument that in the eighteenth century, the literary canon--and the need to adhere to its formulas--had a stronger influence on Russian travel writers than their own, individual perception did. As Dickinson explains, Siberia muted Radishschev as a writer. For Siberia did not offer a landscape or a culture which conformed to the inherited norms of Western travel writing. Only after his return to European Russia--which in contrast to Siberia offered civilized, portrayable landscapes--did Radishchev regain his ability to express himself. The concise third chapter on Denis Karamzin describes the climax and turning point in the Russian adaptation of Western travel writing. Karamzin displayed an intimacy with European literary traditions that was unrivalled by his peers. He masterly expressed himself within its framework, thereby elegantly demonstrating Russian parity with West European literary standards. Karamzin's legacy, as Dickinson explains, is at least twofold. On the one hand, his European erudition meant a final emancipation from the superior Western model. From then on, Russia'slettres would rely on European literary concepts as a contrast, or a means, of further demarcating what was distinctly "Russian." On the other hand, Karamzin's literary success provoked a substantial number of less gifted imitators to follow in his footsteps. Focusing on Russia for ideological or practical reasons during the Napoleonic Era, these lesser writers created sentimentalist clichés in their accounts of their domestic journeys. Nevertheless, their idealisation of Russia and its provincial dwellers foreshadowed populist attitudes of the later nineteenth century. Against this backdrop of a turning away from West European literary constructs, Dickinson titled the chapter that follows "A Return to Europe." In this chapter, Dickinson explores Russian travelogues from the time of the war against Napoleon and the later reign of Alexander I, known as an era of intense Western influence transmitted by officers and soldiers returning to Russia. These victorious Russian officers reacted with ambivalence to the former model culture of France and were inclined to repudiate Western prejudices towards Russia with a new self-consciousness. While not exactly accounts of "leisured" travelers, Dickinson finds that the officers were thoroughly acquainted with earlier Russian and European tourists, and she observes that there was a revival of the "Grand Tour" in the postwar period. Her comparative analysis of four accounts of the Rhine Falls at Schaffhausen provides a fine illustration of the power and the appeal that established clichés exerted on Russian travelers as well as the nuances emerging from the cross-references between their accounts. The fifth and final chapter traces the development or demise, properly speaking, of travel writing during the era of Nicolas I in the early nineteenth century. It encompasses the most heterogeneous sample of travel writing in Dickinson’s work, including Fyodor Glinka's domestic travel accounts from Citation: H-Net Reviews. Noack on Dickinson, 'Breaking Ground: Travel and National Culture in Russia from Peter I to the Era of Pushkin'. H-Travel. 03-18-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/15531/reviews/15589/noack-dickinson-breaking-ground-travel-and-national-culture-russia Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Travel 1810-11, Vilgelm Kiukhelbeker's impressions from mid-1820s Europe, Nikolai Gogol's reflections on Russian and Ukrainian landscapes from abroad, Alexander Pushkin's travel impression as reflected in Evgeny Onegin, and finally Vasily Zhukovsky's didactic journeys through provincial Russia with Tsarevich Aleksander Nikolaevich. Their common denominator, according to Dickinson, was their growing detachment from the corpus and rules of classical Western travelogues. Or, the other way round, all of the writers, whose work she examines in this chapter, contributed to an indigenous Russian literary tradition--a development that ultimately led to the decay of travel writing as a literary genre in Russia. Although Dickinson's points are well argued in thistour d' horizon, the chapter also displays the limits of her approach. By definition, these texts largely transcended what was initially defined as the subject of the book. Dickinson now emphasizes issues of "identity" and "geography" and uncovers a legacy of travel writing that permeated new literary genres. While this point is convincingly explained, the reader wonders whether this might or might not have been true for other literary genres. And what happened to travel writing below the standards of "high" literature? Such literature, including guidebooks to Russian cities and Russian translations of Western guidebooks,

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