Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917 (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies)

Review\n"This is another excellent release in the NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies... a nuanced and enlightening book written in clear, jargon-free prose." ― Choice\n"This highly important book provides a new understanding of what the author calls the provincial trope in Russian literature.The book has significant implications for history as well as literary criticism." ― The Russian Review\n"The book's scope is one of its strongest qualities: Lounsbery goes beyond Gogol' and Chekhov and includes a range of other writers' uses of the provincial trope. The result is a fascinating and exhaustive analysis of the symbolic geography of Russian nineteenth-century literature." ― Slavonic and East European Review\n"This book does a rare thing: it takes a topic that all readers of nineteenth-century Russian literature think they understand, provintsiia, and demonstrates that this apparently selfevident construct, associated with boredom and meaninglessness, is multifaceted, vibrant, and significant. In so doing, Life is Elsewhere genuinely transforms our understanding of nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture." ― Canadian Slavonic Papers\n"Life Is Elsewhere is a striking example of a successful thematic approach to literary analysis. At the same time, it is a bold re-evaluation of overlooked themes and texts in Russian literature, lending itself both to classroom discussion and to the rediscovery of individual writers in new contexts." ― Modern Language Review\n"This is a magisterial book, generous in its wealth of information and citations, theoretically informed, thorough, and beautifully written.Lounsbery has proven that the Russian provinces are in fact deeply interesting, both as a foil and as a broader vehicle for helping us grapple with challenges of Russian identity and Russia's place both in the canon of world literature and geopolitically in the world." ― Slavic Review\nIn Life Is Elsewhere, Anne Lounsbery 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. Lounsbery 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. Using a comparative approach, she 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, Lounsbery 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.