A Nation Astray: Nomadism and National Identity in Russian Literature

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments I would like to convey my gratitude to the many colleagues and friends who have contributed to the completion of this book. The idea for it was conceived while I was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley; thus my first thanks and largest debt are to the illustrious faculty there who set me on the path of writing this project: Harsha Ram, olga Matich, David Frick, Anne Nesbet, Yuri slezkine, viktor Zhivov, Joachim Klein, and, for more inspiration, encouragement, and assistance than I can possibly express, Irina Paperno. This book was largely completed while teaching at the University of Florida, and I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to my many kind and generous colleagues there, but especially to Michael Gorham, Galina Rylkova, and Barbara Mennel for their tireless support of both the moral and practical variety. This project has benefited greatly over the years from conversations and collaboration with many wonderful and valued colleagues, among them: sara Dickinson, Anne Dwyer, Katya Hokanson, Anne Lounsbery, John Randolph, valeria sobol, Gitta Hammarberg, Michael Kunichika, Jenny Kaminer, victoria somoff, Luba Golburt, Avram Brown, Anne eakin Moss, Lynn Patyk, stuart Finkel, Boris wolfson, Christopher Caes, and James Goodwin. I would also like to thank the editors Amy Farranto and susan Bean at Northern Illinois University Press for their assistance and support throughout the publication process, as well as the anonymous readers for their most valuable comments and suggestions. I owe special thanks to Anne Dwyer, Kirsten Rodine Hardy, Deborah Yalen, and Lisa Zwicker for their abiding friendship and intellectual companionship over the years and across many milestones. My deepest gratitude is to my x Acknowledgments husband, Conor o’Dwyer, whose patience, support, marvelous reading and editing abilities, and calm in moments of crisis have done much to make this book possible. I dedicate it to him and to my son, Declan. I am indebted to the Center for the Humanities and the Public sphere at the University of Florida and the former Center for slavic and east european studies (now the Institute of slavic, east european, and eurasian studies) at the University of California, Berkeley for their generous financial assistance at various stages of this project. My work has benefited from access to valuable resources at the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the slavic Library at the Czech National Library in Prague. I am grateful to the state Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow for permission to reprint Isaak Levitan’s painting “vladimirka” (1892) on the cover of this book. An earlier version of Chapter 1 was published as “Caught at the Border:Travel, Nomadism, and Russian Identity in Karamzin’s Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika and Dostoevskii’s Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh” in the Slavic and East European Journal 50.2 (2006): 231–51. Material from “superfluous Journeys: A Reading of ‘onegin’s Journey’ and ‘A Journey around the world by I. oblomov,’” Russian Review 70.1 (2011): 20–42, appears in revised form in Chapter 4, and a modified version of the second half of Chapter 4 has been published as “Russia’s wild east? Domesticating the siberian Frontier in Fregat Pallada” in the Slavic and East European Journal 56.1 (2012): 21–37. A Nation Astray This Page intentionally left blank ...