In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

C H A P T e R o N e Tracing the Topos of the eternal Russian Traveler Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler and Dostoevsky’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions Karamzin’s 1797 Letters of a RussianTraveler (Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika) and Dostoevsky’s 1863 Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh) are at first glance very different texts, lying as they do at the outer boundaries of the Russian Romantic period, yet they exist in an important lineage of Russian writing about travel and identity. Given their different time periods, a comparison of the two is perhaps unorthodox. The chief reason for juxtaposing Karamzin’s seminal travel text and Dostoevsky’s mid-nineteenth-century essay here is that they serve as bookends between which notions of eternal travel, frustrated or impossible return, and cultural nomadism developed in the Russian literary context. A close look at these texts in proximity allows for a sharp delineation of the contours of the discourse under discussion and for an exploration of the way in which Winter Notes engages in a critical dialogue with the Karamzinian paradigm of the Russian traveler.1 An unprecedented phenomenon in the Russian literary context, Karamzin’s Letters would have a profound influence on Russian arts and letters and on Russian cultural practice. Letters—modeled on european travel accounts, among other sources—offered a new model of how to be an educated, elite, and cosmopolitan Russian.2 This new Russian was at his core a traveler: someone who possessed the ability and the desire to travel to europe and to come to know 24 A N A T I o N A s T R A Y himself more fully by departing from his native land. The Russian elite identity predicated in Letters was an identity that was defined by the act of travel itself, and it was one that inspired generations of future Russians to travel and to write about it. The title Letters of a Russian Traveler itself does much to establish a link between Russianness and travel. It suggests, first, that there is something unique about a Russian who travels, or that there is a distinctly Russian kind of travel or a Russian way of seeing the world, and of seeing europe in particular. By the same token, the title also implies that the Russian traveler is himself an object of interest to others, and perhaps especially to a european audience. The Russian abroad, then, is something of a curiosity, as well as a curious person in his own right, and, as the title seems to so confidently proclaim, this complex identity is a positive, seemingly unproblematic phenomenon. The fact of the Russian traveler who moves between Russia and europe does not jeopardize the notion or status of Russia’s very existence, as this elite paradigm would later come to do in Russian literary consciousness, but rather confirms the translatability of the borders between the two spaces: it is possible to go between the two, and the narrator of Letters is a traveler who arrives and departs, and who moves from one point to another in space and time. These are deceptively simple accomplishments that will prove to be no small feat given the stalled eternal motion of the Russian traveler’s later incarnations in Russian literature. The success of Karamzin’s text was such that it undermined the very pose it so energetically sought to establish. The association of Russian elite identity with travel (and writing) came to acquire profound metaphysical implications, such that an entire discourse of national wandering and nomadism—or a lack of attachment to place, to people, and to time and history—arose in nineteenthcentury Russian consciousness. while this discourse was the product of several strains of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought, Letters played a crucial role in establishing a connection between Russian identity and travel. This chapter offers a close look at two significant points in the development of the discourse of Russian nomadism and outlines how Dostoevsky’s 1863 Winter Notes on Summer Impressions critiques Karamzin’s pose of the cosmopolitan Russian traveler. Winter Notes directly engages with Karamzin’s model for Russian travel, but does so in a way that lays bare the existential dilemma that lies behind the association of national identity with motion, itinerancy, travel, and wandering. Winter Notes presents the reader with a Russian traveler explicitly “caught at the border” or stalled permanently between Russia and europe, a conundrum...

Share