On the Path to Russian Modernity

Large-scale construction of the railroad in the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century coincided with extensive developments in Russian social, economic, and cultural life. Contemporaries noted with interest and apprehension the rapid and comprehensive transformation of Russian society, with increased mobility greatly altering the old Russian modes of life. For example, the railroad greatly affected the practices and traditions of the aristocracy, already well established at the time of Catherine the Great (for instance, wintering at their palace in the city and summering at the country estate with a select circle of friends and acquaintances). Count Vladimir Sologub complained that the life of his relatives “is no longer rooted to the soil but sniffs like an angry woman from corner to corner. Families are fractured and roam from inn to inn.”¹ Writers intentionally set their scenes in train cars because they brought representatives from all social classes face to face. It was here that the fateful acquaintance between Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin took place in Fedor Dostoevskii’s The Idiot. New high-speed transport influenced passengers’ feelings and emotions to a large degree. The protagonist in Lev Tolstoi’s short story “The Kreutzer Sonata” acknowledged that railway travel put him in the most aggressive and callous mood: he killed his wife out of (baseless) jealousy just after arriving home from the train station. In discussing Russia’s “entry” into modernity, Frithjof Benjamin Schenk systematically analyzes these infrastructural developments in great detail.

In his Habilitation, published in German (2014) and in Russian (2017), Schenk explores the cultural history of the railroad in imperial Russia from the second half of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th centuries. Through the lens of rail transport and its role in creating (new) social spaces across the empire, Schenk investigates large-scale transformation in Russia and the empire’s entrance into modernity. In his work, he focuses on the interaction between space and society, drawing on the theoretical work of sociologists. This approach charts a new and productive course for empirical studies of the railroad. Following Dieter Läpple, Schenk devotes his attention to four areas in the study of social spaces: the material substratum (in particular, the history of the creation of the railroad’s “machine ensemble”); rules and regulations; public practices; and symbolic coding and the perception of space through imaginative geography and mental maps.²

Such a thematic focus is new for the study of the railroad. For the first time, the history of the railroad in Russia is analyzed in the context of cultural history on a large scale. Previous literature (including Soviet literature) generally focused on the economic and political significance of rail transport in the prerevolutionary period. To an extent, Schenk’s book is a complement to two other German-language studies on communication routes by Roland Cvetkovski and Walter Sperling. Cvetkovski develops themes of time, space, and mobility through an analysis of the railroad as well as other infrastructures functioning in Russia in the same period, such as the post office and commercial waterways.³ Sperling directs his attention to regional history and questions about the development of transport in Central Russia (Saratov and Iaroslavl´ gubernias).⁴ Schenk, however, focuses on the railroad throughout Russia. He pays close attention to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Central Russia but also to several crucial regions with unique local features, such as the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia.

In chapter 1, “Representations of Space in Russian Discourse on the Railroad,” Schenk discusses representations of imperial space in the design phase of railroad construction. Thanks to the speed and regularity of communication, many remote regions...