A Nation Astray: Nomadism and National Identity in Russian Literature 9781501756689

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A NationlAstray

A Nation Astray Nomadism and National Identity in Russian Literature

Ingrid Kleespies

N I U P RE S S I DeKalb, IL

© 2012 by Northern Illinois University Press

Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115 All Rights Reserved Design by Shaun Allshouse

Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data Kleespies, Ingrid. A nation astray : nomadism and national identity in Russian literature / Ingrid Kleespies. pages; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87580-461-3 (cloth) -

ISBN (invalid) 978-1-60909-076-0 (electronic)

1. Russian literature-19th century-History and criticism. 2. Nomads in literature. 3.

Travelers in literature. 4. National characteristics, Russian, in literature. 5. Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich, 1766-1826. Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika. 6. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 18211881. Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh. 7. Chaadaev, P. IA. (Petr IAkovlevich), 1794-1856. Lettres philosophiques. 8.

Goncharov, Ivan Aleksandrovich, 1812-1891-

Criticism and interpretation. 9. Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich, 1799-1837-Criticism and interpretation. 10. Herzen, Aleksandr, 1812-1870-Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PG3015.5.N66K54 2012 891.709'3526918-dc23 2012030637

The glamour of youth enveloped his parti-coloured rags, his destitution, his loneliness, the essential desolation of his futile wanderings. For months-for years-his life hadn't been worth a day's purchase-and there he was, gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all appearance indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and of his unreflecting audacity. -Joseph Conrad, Heart ofDarkness

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

3

INTRODUCTION CHAPTER ONE:

Tracing the Topos of the Eternal Russian Traveler Karamzin's Letters ofa Russian Traveler and Dostoevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions

23

CHAPTER TWO:

Chaadaev's Wayward Russia Capturing the Trace of an Errant History

47

CHAPTER THREE:

A Poet Astray Pushkin and the Image of a Nomadic Wanderer

81

CHAPTER FOUR:

''A Journey around the World by I. Oblomov'' Goncharov's Unlikely Eternal Russian Traveler

113

CHAPTER FIVE:

A Radical at Large Alexander Herzen and the Autobiography of a Russian Wanderer CONCLUSION

Notes

185

Bibliography Index

235

219

175

144

Acknowledgments

J

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 Marich, 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 Sarnoff, 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 Pisrna russkogo puteshestvennika and Dostoevskii's Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh" in the Slavic and East Europeanjournal50.2 (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.l (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. l (2012): 21-37.

A NationlAstray

Introduction

Even today these homeless Russian wanderers continue their wandering; they will not disappear, it seems, for a long time yet. And if in our time these wanderers no longer go to Gypsy camps to search in that wild, distinctive way of life for universal ideals, nor look for respite from the contradictory and absurd life of our Russian intelligentsia [... ] in the bosom of nature, then, all the same [... ]they go with new faith towards another field and work on it enviably, believing[ ... ], that in their fantastical endeavor they will reach their goals and will attain not only personal, but universal, happiness. -F. M. Dostoevsky, "Pushkin" 1

The lines above come from Dostoevsky's famous 1880 "Pushkin Speech," delivered in Moscow at the first public commemoration of Pushkin in Russia since the poet's death in 1837. The Pushkin Jubilee, as it was known, was a highly significant literary and historical event, one that reveals a great deal about the role of literature-and writers-in nineteenth-century Russia. Pushkin had died at odds with the authorities and at an apparent low point in his literary career; the government made his funeral a restrained affair for fear that allowing a massive outpouring of grief might serve as a catalyst to liberal protest or even outright rebellion. 2 Almost fifry years later, the three-day jubilee in 1880 was the long-overdue acknowledgment of Pushkin's foundational role in Russian arts and letters; those present experienced it as a "major historical happening." 3

4

A NATION ASTRAY

Unexpectedly, it was Dostoevsky's speech, presented on the last day and at the very height of his own career, that became the cornerstone of the event. 4 The speech, in which Dostoevsky celebrated Russian distinctiveness through the lens of "Pushkin" (both the man and his oeuvre) and avowed Pushkin's genius to the world, incited jubilant pandemonium and even fits of hysteria in the receptive crowd. 5 In this epic "meeting" between two of Russia's greatest writers, Dostoevsky turned on its head the familiar critique of Russian elite culture as derivative of the West, proclaiming instead that Russia's capacity for cultural imitation was in fact a special form of national genius: one of appropriation and transformation. Russia, he argued, appropriated the best products of other cultures and transformed them into something new and superior. His speech championed "Pushkin," construed as simultaneously the most European and the most Russian of Russian poets, as a protean Russian chameleon extraordinaire, one who not so much imitated as brilliantly outperformed all others in any and all European literary forms. Less immediately apparent, but of crucial importance to the impact of the speech, is Dostoevsky's introduction of the term Russian wanderer (russkii skitalets). Dostoevsky gave name to a powerful motif in Russian culture here, and this motif-or discursive phenomenon-is the subject of this book. Leaving aside the messianic conclusions of Dostoevsky's speech-that Russian unity would offer salvation to Europe and the world-this discussion takes as its starting point Dostoevsky's characterization of Russian national consciousness and, in particular, his personification of aspects of Russian identity in the figure of the "Russian wanderer." While he suggests in positive terms that the genius of Russian literature is its malleability, its ability to change shape and inhabit the forms and practices of other national literatures, at the same time he identifies as problematic the wandering or "nomadic" nature of the Russian elite, embodied for him both by Pushkin himself and by some of the poet's most famous characters. Indeed, even what Dostoevsky identifies as Pushkin's genius of changeability is easily viewed more as a form of national rootlessness than poetic skill. Defined by homelessness, a lack of connection to their native land, and displacement, Dostoevsky's Russian wanderers are national travelers, nomads, or wanderers by virtue of their lack of fixity and purpose. The wanderer embodied in the speech is a metaphor that reaches far beyond Dostoevsky and his performance at the Pushkin Jubilee, however. It is a potent symbolic articulation of the troubled nature of Russian national identity, an identity embodied by a nineteenthcentury intellectual elite that has been cut off from the Russian people (narod) by its Western-style education and cultural proclivities, yet remains excluded from Western European society by dint of its native Russianness. 6 In Dostoevsky's speech, this identity is personified by two iconic characters from Pushkin's poetic oeuvre, Onegin and Aleko. Onegin, the restless protagonist

Introduction

5

of Eugene Onegin (1833), is doomed to a life of figurative homeless wandering when a combination of ennui and superfluity leads him to kill a friend in a duel and to spurn the love of the heroine, Tatiana. Aleko, the protagonist of Pushkin's 1823-1824 poem "The Gypsies," is an exile. Cast out from society for an unnamed crime, he attempts to join a band of Gypsies in the Russian south. He is in turn exiled from the Gypsies when his jealous nature leads him to murder his unfaithful Gypsy lover Zemfira and her lover. As Russian readers were well aware, Aleko's name is a version of Pushkin's own name, Alexander, and Pushkin himself had served time as a political exile in the same southern borderlands in the early 1820s. Symbolically speaking, Pushkin shared in his protagonists' peripatetic homelessness, and the appearance of these iconic examples in Dostoevsky's speech marks a discursive practice that encompasses much more than Pushkin's works or Dostoevsky's treatment of them. The perception of Russia as a figuratively nomadic nation and of Russians themselves as nomadic wanderers excluded from, or confined to the margins of, European civilization and history came to be a central topos of nineteenth-century Russian national thought. It was articulated most vibrantly in key works of Russian literature, and especially in work by the seminal writers Nikolai Karamzin, Petr Chaadaev, Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Goncharov, Alexander Herzen, and Feodor Dostoevsky. Recent scholarship has demonstrated just how crucial symbols, myths, and metaphors are to the understanding of national identities; the perception of Russia as nomadic, while articulated in literary terms, mattered far beyond the realm of arts and letters. 7 National symbols and metaphors always bear political power, but in a restricted public sphere in which civic and political debates on nation and empire building were constrained or notably absent, as in nineteenth-century Russia, symbolic representations of the nation came to be all the more forceful. Thus the conceptualization of Russia as nomadic would come to be a defining feature of national consciousness. Just how did the problem of elite Russian identity come to be embodied in the figure of a homeless wanderer for writers such as Dostoevsky, Pushkin, or Herzen? Where did the image of a Russian wanderer derive from? This book considers these questions as it examines the discourse of wandering, traveling, and nomadism that developed around the perception of an uncertain, or unfixed, Russian identity, particularly as it was imagined in relation to Western Europe. Dostoevsky was hardly the first Russian writer and thinker to understand the problematic nature of Russian identity in such terms: as his speech suggests, Pushkin's Aleko and Onegin are but the most readily identifiable examples of a literary phenomenon that plays a central role in Russian thought. In this book, I consider the origins and meaning of a nineteenth-century discursive practice in which Russia was construed as a nation of travelers and as a nomadic nation, one that was not fixed in space or time,

6

A NATION ASTRAY

but was instead perceived to be excluded from history and as lacking definition as a territorial entity or homeland. In readings of works by the authors named above, I draw out a key, if previously underexamined, aspect of Russian national thought that sheds light on the reception and integration of ideas of identity, history, and European civilization in the Russian context. The writers and thinkers mentioned above were deeply concerned with the question of what it meant to be Russian, and, with the exception of Chaadaev, they engaged in some form of travel writing as a means of elaborating on this question. While the practices of travel and travel writing played an important role in European culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was in the Russian context that these practices acquired a special metaphysical slant. Travel itself came to be perceived as an essential aspect of "Russianness"it was an identity of travel, or, in other words, of movement, of rootlessness, and of lack of fixity, an identity that was best crystallized in imagery of eternal travelers, wanderers, and nomads. Such imagery may seem surprising for Russia given its history of serfdom, travel restrictions, and strict social hierarchy; however, the identity addressed here encapsulated both Russian and Western views of Russia's relationship to the outside world, and in particular to Europe. The discourse of travel-as-identity drew from several strains of contemporary thought, including European engagement with leisured travel and its role as a key component of elite education, and more deeply, eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of the individual and society. Contemporaneous theories about history and the relative development of European and non-European societies also played an important role, while the Romantic worldview, in which the topos of the journey was a fundamental organizing principle, provided a critical symbolic language for the expression of anxiety among Russian elites over both individual and national identity. In an even more primary sense, the very idea of national identity was itself an imported one in the Russian context. Educated Russians in the nineteenth century were the bearers of a peculiar kind of national consciousness, one that was perceived as having come into being in reaction to, or because of, the existence of this concept in the West. An awareness of its own imported nature profoundly shaped Russian national consciousness from the outset in complex ways. 8 It had at its core an awareness of Russia's difference-and distance-from the West. This was a consciousness that was not experienced as rooted (that is, as organically derived from spatial-cultural origins), but rather as in a constant state of awayness, and, as such, it was defined in basic terms by its distance and exclusion from original models, such as those of English or French nationhood. In this sense, Russians first came to know themselves only as "other," as objects of observation rather than as subjective observers. Regardless of the accuracy of

Introduction

7

such perceptions, the presence of these ideas contributed to a consciousness that was by nature unsettled. In order for the Russian subject to conceive of himself in national terms, he had to perform an operation of mental travel, however brisk, to Europe and back. Any discussion of Russian national consciousness in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries necessarily touches on Enlightenment conceptualizations of civilization and historical progress. Eastern European societies, while not actually nomadic, were as yet perceived to be less developed than the "civilized" societies of Western Europe; in fact, there was a powerful association of the East with barbarism. 9 In the case of Russia, the legacy of nomadic Mongolian invasions from the Steppes, the comparatively "lower" level of cultural and political development, and the perception of exclusion from the course of Western European events combined to create a common Western perception of Russia as "barbaric" and "uncivilized." Further, among the most frequently cited examples of nomadic groups in Enlightenment literature were the ancient Scythians and the contemporary Tatars, groups that had played a historic role in the formation of the Russian state and which were contained within the boundaries of the Russian empire. In the eyes of European and Russian observers alike, a fine line demarcated Russian society from exotic, and presumably more truly nomadic, peoples such as the Gypsies (as they were referred to in the nineteenth century). Internalization of a Western binary of civilization and its others would coalesce in Russian literary consciousness under the influence of emerging Romantic narratives that privileged motifs of alienation, dislocation, and rootlessness. The resulting perception of Russian identity is the subject of this book. The notion that Russia was uncivilized forms a specific undercurrent for Russian Romantic identity. The logic by which civilization was seen to derive from the establishment of a sedentary-agricultural mode of subsistence would find a curious application in the Russian context: a people perceived as uncivilized and uncultivated in comparison to Western Europe came to be understood, in figurative terms, as ahistorical and nomadic; that is, as not yet belonging to the sedentary-agricultural, cultivated, historical world. The belief that Russia was not yet a historical entity like the nation-states of Western Europe meant that Russia was metaphorically positioned at a pre-historical, pre-civilized stage of development, like that of "pre-agricultural" pastoral nomads. European observers of Russia had arrived at such a conclusion in the early nineteenth century. The French thinkers Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and later the Marquis de Custine, all applied the descriptor "nomadic" to Russia, not so much to suggest observation of an actual pastoral social structure, but rather to illustrate their perceptions of Russian backwardness, ahistoricality, and exclusion from European civilization. w For these authors, the metaphor of the nomad served to embody in

8

A NATION ASTRAY

spatial terms (i.e., homelessness, rootlessness) the perception of Russia's temporal displacement in relation co the civilized centers of Europe. This subtle rhetorical move would form a critical backdrop to the work of che writers considered here, and in particular to philosopher Petr Chaadaev's choice of the image of the nomad to describe Russians in his famous 1829 First Philosophical Letter. Travel writing serves a special purpose for my discussion of Russian identity here. Arguably, the genre is one innately concerned with the dilemma of history in chat it attempts to capture that which is by nature fleeting-movement through space and time. In this vein, travel writing functions as a productive medium for the articulation of the idea of Russian icinerancy, that is, the perceived lack of any secure attachment to history. While texts such as Karamzin's Letters ofa Russian Traveler (Pisma russkogo puteshestvennika, 1797), Pushkin's Southern poems (1820s) and journey to Arzrum (Puteshestvie v Arzrum, 1835), Goncharov's Frigate Pallas (Fregat Pallada, 1858), and Dostoevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh, 1863) are more or less classifiable as travel texts, they are also fundamentally preoccupied with Russian identity, the role of the Russian writer, and Russia's complicated relationship to conventional narratives of Western European history. Consequently, this book is concerned not with Russian travel texts per se, of which there are many, but specifically with canonical works of literature that address the issue of Russian identity in metaphysical terms of travel, nomadism, and wandering. 11 For this reason, I also include Chaadaev's 1829 First Philosophical Letter, Goncharov's 1859 Oblomov, and Herzen's 1852-1867 My Past and Thoughts, none of which are travelogues, but all of which function as key philosophical elaborations of the metaphor of Russians as travelers. I consider here how the topos of nomadic wandering itself travels through key works of Russian literature. I look at critical textual moments in the interval between the publication of Nikolai Karamzin's Letters ofa Russian Traveler and Feodor Dostoevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. Karamzin's work, while not the first example of Russian travel writing, was a seminal text in that it established the paradigm of an elite, educated Russian who is first and foremost a traveler, and specifically a traveler to the West. While Karamzin's narrative pose in Letters ofa Russian Traveler is seemingly cosmopolitan and self-assured, I argue that the legacy of this text was quite different. The powerful association of an elite Russian identity with travel gave rise to unsettling associations, suggesting that Russians were "on the road," removed from the domestic sphere, and psychologically suspended between a recollected home and a lived abroad. These components, lying beneath the surface ofKaramzin's positive image of the successful traveler, came to be writ large in the Russian national consciousness during the ensuing decades.

Introduction

9

Tracing Karamzin's image of the Russian traveler, I examine how notions of history, civilization, the nation, and the individual coalesced in Chaadaev's appropriation of nomadic wandering as a central metaphor for Russian subjects and for the Russian state in his First Philosophical Letter (1829). Pushkin's representations of the lyrical Russian subject in his Southern poems (1820s) as a troubled, demonic wanderer astray in the imperial borderlands and in journey to Arzrum (1835) as a restless, endlessly circulating authorial self are important manifestations of nomadic wandering. Pushkin's characters, conventionally received as emblems of Russian elite identity, are cast out from both civilization and history; they are travelers who cannot leave a trace. I argue that the image of the "Russian astray"-or the "homeless" Russian attempting to return to a fictional point of domestic origin-is developed at length by Ivan Goncharov in Oblomov (1859) and in his 1858 travel text Frigate Pallas. Here, in a powerful reimagining of the Russian wanderer, Goncharov's protagonist is a homebody without a home, trapped in a permanent state of awayness. In his seminal autobiography My Past and lhoughts (1852-1867), a text that reflects wandering on both the thematic and formal levels, Alexander Herzen represents both himself and his generation as eternal travelers and wanderers: they are exiles to the West, enacting Romantic biographies of peripatetic rebellion. Herzen at once builds on and reacts against Hegelian constructs of historical progression to argue for a reversal of Chaadaev's critique: Russian nomadic or "outsider" status is transformed into an advantage over Western fixity and decay. 12 Finally, in his W'inter Notes on Summer Impressions and the Pushkin speech of 1880, Dostoevsky on the one hand explicitly critiques his immediate predecessors for perpetuating the discourse of Russia as a nation of nomads and strangers and, on the other hand, recreates this very stance. Winter Notes is, in many respects, a reworking of Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveler, one in which the Russian traveler is exposed as permanently abroad and incapable of homecoming, too European for Russia and too Russian for Europe. In the Pushkin speech, where we began, Dostoevsky identifies the "Russian wanderer" as a phase of Russian historical development, thus seeming to place an endpoint on this troublesome trope of traveling. Yet Dostoevsky's very insistence on this endpoint (while serving as a natural endpoint for my discussion) belies the deep and continued relevance of this image to Russian national thought.

Nomads, Wanderers, and Travelers Taken together, the symbolic figures of the nomad, wanderer, and traveler suggest mobility, lack of fixity, homelessness, and alienation or exclusion from

10

A NATION ASTRAY

a prevailing social context. All three terms are related to exile, but they are distinguished from this static state by their explicit emphasis on movement. If they are taken separately, however, there are key differences in meaning among them that require delineation here. The English word "nomad," like the French nomade, derives from the Latin nomos and the Greek root nemein (to take, allot, divide, distribute) and is related to the practice of portioning out pasturelands. The word appeared in English in the 1600s but did not come into regular usage until the eighteenth century, 13 when the disciplines of the social sciences, especially anthropology, began to take shape. The word was conventionally used to describe pastoral groups, or those whose primary mode of subsistence consisted of herding animals. This was a means of life in which periodic and sustained episodes of travel were essential. In its most fundamental application, the term nomad describes a system of social organization; its application to any group, however, has never been free of the judgment that nomadic societies are "less developed" than settled ones-or of other critical assumptions about nomadic society that I will discuss below. A wanderer differs from a nomad in that he is not a member of a social group, but rather an individual who has been removed from society, whether by choice or necessity. While not inherently a negative image, the wanderer in literature frequently has dark origins, as in the Biblical story of Cain or the apocryphal tale of the Wandering Jew. In contrast to the nomad, the wanderer travels permanently, and moves from place to place without a specific destination. Further, the wanderer does so outside of the confines of tradition and culture. While by definition he lacks a fixed destination, the wanderer is often depicted as someone seeking after an ideal, such as spiritual redemption. The nomad is placed within a group civilizational hierarchy of "settlement" and "non-settlement"; the wanderer serves more as an antithesis to the individual in a conventional, settled society. Finally, the traveler, like the nomad and the wanderer, is on the move, but only temporarily so. The traveler may well have a home or homeland to return to, but for the duration of his journey he is distanced from his normal social milieu and, like a wanderer or a nomad, away from home-even, in a temporary sense, homeless. The Romantic image of the "eternal traveler" is a further elaboration on this theme: here the traveler is perceived as permanently on the road, not wandering without a clear destination, but rather, doomed never to reach his destination or return to his point of origin. Problematic points of origin and return-and the relevance these have to the difficulties of locating home and homeland in the Russian context-will play a critical role in some of the works considered here, especially those by Goncharov and Dostoevsky. The symbolic overlap and exchange between the figures of wanderers, travelers, and nomads in Russian literary discourse constitute what I term "nomadism," that

Introduction

11

is, a framing of Russian socio-cultural dilemmas in metaphoric terms related to travel, mobility, and itinerancy. To add yet another wrinkle to the distinctions above, the practice of wandering (stranstvie) carried distinct religious meaning in the nineteenth century Russian cultural context. 14 The iurodivyi, or holy fool, was a highly eccentric, if not truly mad, individual believed to have special spiritual and prophetic powers. lurodivye typically roamed the Russian countryside, subsisting on charity and offering various forms of spiritual guidance to the community. The veneration that iurodivye received meant that irrational behavior, such as speaking incomprehensibly or dressing in chains, was elevated to the level of saintly spirituality in traditional Russian culture. 15 Chief among the important paradoxes the iurodivyi embodied was his vagabond lifestyle and role as a wanderer (strannik). 16 This peripatetic life lay in direct contrast, even reproach, to the settled life of mainstream society. Ewa Thompson notes that "the holy fool's opposition to legalism and to stable social structure was highly esteemed in Russian society," suggesting that the holy fool's rejection of domestic sedentarism was received as a marker of intense spirituality. 17 Furthermore, the vagabond lifestyle of the strannik was viewed as a unique national practice, one that distinguished Russian tradition and society from its Western counterparts. 18 This phenomenon serves as an important backdrop to the literary and philosophical treatment of wandering and nomadism under discussion here. In order to distinguish between the individual or religiously motivated practice of wandering and the expression of an existential national dilemma that I discuss here, I refer to the latter as nomadic wandering. It also bears noting that nineteenth-century Russia possessed its fair share of real wanderers and vagabonds, whether religious or otherwise. Al; Alan Wood comments in his history of Siberia, vagrancy played a role in nineteenth-century imperial Russian society, perhaps to a greater extent than in other European contexts: ... Russia was in fact a country with a rich variety of nomadic and migratory traditions. A huge internal diaspora of runaway peasants, cossacks, pilgrims and peripatetic sectarians, caravans of merchants, peddlers, gypsies, schools of skoromokhi [wandering players], bands of migrant hunters, craftsmen and promyshlenniki [tradesmen], as well as the nomadic tribes of steppe, forest, and

tundra-all for countless generations had been the collective personification of Russia on the move. 19

While vagrancy in nineteenth-century Russia is not the central point of discussion in this book, it is important to bear in mind that the sociocultural practices of vagabondage, migration, religious wandering, and actual

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A NATION ASTRAY

nomadism helped shape the literary articulation of Russian identity in terms of peripatetic mobility.

The "Four Stages of Development": Nomads versus History The concept of civilization came into being during the Enlightenment, and with it arose related concerns about the nature of history and the relative status of different nations and societies. 20 As noted earlier, the term nomad did not come into regular usage in English until the eighteenth century, and the reason for the appearance of these words-civilization and nomad-lies in the twin Enlightenment impulses of global discovery and the development of the social sciences. The rise of travel as both a leisure practice and a form of scientific exploration lent impetus to the urge toward categorization and comparison that would form the basis of disciplines such as anthropology. The attempt by Enlightenment scholars to understand the nature of man and society in scientific terms helped to produce comparative schema for evaluating the respective development of nations and societies.2' As the voyages of discovery and the prolific literature inspired by them revealed, distinct peoples lived by different means in different places. These people could be classified for better or for worse-usually for worse-into categories of relative development in comparison to the centers of Western Europe. In fact, the very division of Europe into distinct socio-political entities of West and East would take place in this period, as Western thinkers began to conceive of an "Eastern Europe" that was less developed than the West. In this formulation, Eastern Europe, and Russia in particular, was placed in a unique position as Europe's other, that is, as a "shadow" version of the West, not fully civilized and not integral to the historical progression of Western Europe. 22 Thinkers from Smith to Rousseau generated a widely accepted conceptual framework for observing and comparing societies within a larger construct of universal history. This framework consisted of a set of four stages through which all societies were believed to progress (or fail to progress). As social scientist Ronald Meek shows in his classic study, this resulted in a perceived hierarchy of social development, in which societies "progressed" from the first to the fourth stage over time. 23 The first and most primitive stage was that of hunter-gathering. The American Indian tribes were believed to provide a contemporary example of this stage in the mid-eighteenth century. The second stage was identified as the pastoral or nomadic, in which basic needs of food and shelter were met by keeping and following herds, but additional resources were not sufficient for the development of agriculture or for the practices of cultivation-of the

Introduction

13

fields or of manners. The third stage was marked by the transition from the pastoral-nomadic way of life to the sedentary-agricultural; attainment of an agricultural lifestyle was deemed the most critical in terms of a society's relative level of advancement and was thought to be prompted by population growth, the rise of leisure, and an emerging sense of individual property. The fourth and final stage of social development was commercial and was characterized by the exchange of goods, the circulation of money, the further development of culture and the arts, and the rise of metropolitan centers (developments which would, ironically, lead to new forms of mobility). This last stage represented the apotheosis of civilization, while the first two stages were deemed "uncivilized" and "primitive." Hunter-gatherers were regarded as "savage," that is, as living a minimal, almost animal-like existence, and nomads were traditionally viewed as "barbaric"-that is, as lacking the advanced attributes of the sedentary, civilized world, such as stability, culture, and history. From early on, barbarians were viewed by those who defined them as such as intrinsically hostile to the sedentary world. Importantly, while certain positive values were attributed to peoples in the nomadic stage, including egalitarianism, freedom of movement, and selfsufficiency, the divide between "primitive" and "civilized" was mapped firmly on to the developmental boundary between nomadic and sedentary-agricultural modes of subsistence. 24 A related topic of Enlightenment debate was that of the nature of history: What was its point of origin? What about history was universal and what particular? Scholars linked the origin of history, or of progressive, historical time, to the inception of civilization and the corresponding establishment of a political state or governing body. History, like civilization, was tied to the advent of sedentarism; spatial fixity was considered a necessary precondition for the onset of developmental historical time. The interdependency of sedentarism, civilization, history, and state formation was a given in canonical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works on the philosophy of history, including those by Kant and Hegel. Kant's influential 1786 essay "Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History'' is a notable example of underlying Enlightenment assumptions about the developmental links between settlement (agriculture), civilization, government, and history-assumptions that would play an important role in the context of Russian internalization of Western perceptions of Russian "backwardness": Where people depend for their livelihood on the cultivation of the soil... they require permanent accommodation; and the defense of such property against all encroachment requires a large number of people who are prepared ro assist one another. Hence those who adopted this way oflife could no longer live in scattered

14

A NATION ASTRAY family units, but had to stick together and set up village communities ... in order to protect their property against savage hunters or tribes of pastoral nomads. The first essentials of life which a changed mode ofliving makes necessary could now be acquired by mutual exchange. This inevitably gave rise to culture and the beginnings of art, both as a pastime and as an occupation; but first and foremost, it also meant that certain steps were taken to establish a civil constitution and the public administration of justice ... From these first crude beginnings, all human aptitudes could now gradually develop, the most beneficial of these being sociability and civil security. The human race could multiply and, like a beehive, send out colonists in all directions from the centre-colonists who were already civilised. 25

Aside from penning an apparent justification for colonialism, Kant argues here that civilization (culture, art) is intrinsically linked to the establishment of a state, as well as to economic exchange. Both phenomena create the conditions under which the settlement and cultivation ofland become possible. As scholars have noted, an implicit link is also made in this essay between civilization and history. Pastoralists do not belong to the category of history-civilization because they do not undergo the necessary-if painful-process of social development through strife that agricultural cultivation necessitates. Without this, they fail to create any form of governing body and thus "never enter... the domain of history properly speaking." 26 As Marek Kulisz likewise notes: "History to [Kant] is an advance towards better and better systems of government. There is no history outside the state. History is the history ofthe State." 27 While this particular example is drawn from Kant, the sentiment "history is the history of the state" is applicable to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates on the beginning of history as a whole. Non-settled, "non-civilized" peoples were perceived as lacking organized forms of government and as therefore failing to possess historical presence; they existed outside of progressive historical time because they did not contribute to the universal process of state development. This exclusion suggests that linear, progressive, historical time could not exist in the absence of spatially fixed socio-political structures; time had to transpire in fixed space in order for it to be recordable and significant. In other words, there had to be territory for there to be history; delimited space (a homeland, a state) was a precondition of historical temporality. Those who did not live in a sedentary fashion-"primitive" nomads or hunter-gatherers-were thus "orphans" of history, excluded both from civilized society and from the special time of history in which people and events contributed to the "march of civilization." 28 Interestingly, it is precisely these persistent characterizations of nomadic groups as ahistorical and deterritorialized that the postmodern scholars Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have taken as the basis for their "rehabilitation of the nomad"

Introduction

15

as the positive antithesis to late modern, capitalist hegemony in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). How did these debates on the nature of history and civilization apply to Russia? Viewing Russia as nomadic had important implications: it suggested that Russia did not belong to European/universal historical time, that it did not possess a state, and that it was not a civilized society. Further, and perhaps more subtly, it suggested that Russia was not territorially defined, that it was not a homeland in the way that France, England, or the German lands might be seen-to offer deep-seated cultural, social, and political links between a (more or less) delimited territory and some form of a state. Indeed, the perception of Russia's physical vastness and imperial expansion as something that complicated or destabilized Russian identity would play an important role in the discourse of Russian cultural nomadism, and will be a topic of discussion in some of the texts considered here, including those by Pushkin, Chaadaev, and Goncharov. 29

The Romantic Wanderer Aside from Enlightenment theories of progress, Romanticism was another key cultural subtext that informed the use of nomadic wanderer imagery in the expression of ideas of Russian allienation. Enlightenment emphasis on the nature of history and civilization was critical to the context of Romantic philosophy, in which the relationship between the individual and society and that between the individual and the natural world were central concerns. Romantic thought, in which perceived alienation from conventional society and loss of harmony with the natural world were the organizing tropes (if not traumas) of the poetic self, helped to give shape to the emerging Russian identity under discussion here. An essential precondition of the Romantic self was formulated in terms of a journey or quest, as a search for home, or attempt to return to a lost state of harmonious integration with the surrounding world. 30 Always traveling, yet never able to reach his destination, the Romantic individual was frequently envisioned in symbolic terms as a wanderer, traveler, or pilgrim. Romantic thinkers conceived of this life journey as circular and yet evolutionary, a journey of return that was at the same time a journey of becoming, or of attaining a higher state of consciousness. The Biblical trope of life as a pilgrimage toward union with God was reconfigured in the Romantic context as an attempt to simultaneously return to a mythical point of origin and attain a divine union with the most high. Contemporaneous concern with the Bildungsreise, or journey of self-discovery and education that played a central role in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European culture, reinforced the Romantic interest in wandering and the peripatetic states of travel or motion.

16

A NAT ION AST RAY

The Romantic wanderer was frequently envisioned as a demonic figure, cast out from human society and doomed to travel the earth because of a crime he had committed against God or society. Wanderers are central figures in many key Romantic texts, including Goethe's Faust, Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Cain," Byron's "Cain," "Childe Harold," and "The Giaour," Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Schiller's The Ghost-Seer, Charles Maturin's Me/moth the Wanderer, and Shelley's "The Wandering Jew." In addition to such archetypal wanderers as Cain or Faust, the figure of the Wandering Jew illustrates this trope particularly well. References to the Wandering Jew-also called the Eternal Jew, or Ahasuerus/Ahasver-are legion in English, French, and German Romantic literature. His status as an outcast condemned to a life of eternal wandering as punishment for taunting Christ on the road to the Crucifixion (that is, for challenging divine power) made this symbol particularly compelling. 31 The old tale was reworked in the Romantic period to recast the Wandering Jew as a paradigmatic example of individual defiance, alienation, suffering, and potential for redemption. While the figure of the Wandering Jew was highly suggestive in terms of the predicament of the modern individual, the history of the Jewish diaspora informed this image as well. Like the nomad, the image of the Wandering Jew evoked at once the collective wanderings of a people and the spiritual isolation of the modern individual. Given the Russian experience of an uncertain national consciousness in both individual and collective terms, it is not surprising that this symbol would seem particularly relevant. Several Russian Romantic poets devoted poems to this subject, including Alexander Zhukovsky's "The Eternal Jew" ("Vechnyi zhid"), Kiukhelbeker's "The Eternal Jew" (18321842), Eduard Gubier's "The Eternal Jew" (1847), and Vassily Zhukovsky's ''Ahasver. The Jew-Wanderer" (''Agasver. Zhid strannik," 1851-1852). 32 Romantic emphasis on wandering and spiritual quest coincided with an interest in margins and boundaries of all kinds, particularly those of conventional society and what lay beyond them. In this context, nomadic peoples such as the Gypsies, who were "born to wander," were of great literary interest. Gypsies had long been considered a social grouping that existed as an antithesis to conventional, rooted society, an obvious social other that, in the work of English Romantics, at least, served less as symbols of existential alienation than they did as markers of a primitive, pre-industrial world that was rapidly vanishing from an industrializing landscape. 33 As Katie Trumpener suggests, Gypsies have traditionally been perceived as being outside of both civilization and history. They essentially serve to "stop time" when they appear in literary narratives. 34 Their itinerancy is collective, unlike the wanderer's solitary state of perpetual, peripatetic exile. Like the figure of the Wandering Jew, however, the Gypsies could provide a symbolic model for imagining Russian identity in relation to

Introduction

17

Western Europe. The nomadic Gypsies were understood to be both outside of civilization and attached to its margins-a distorted mirror image of European society, and a marker of a primitive, nomadic past extending into the present. While Romantic thought generally engaged with issues of both national and individual identity, the Russian Romantic context is distinguished by a persistent conflation of these issues. Speaking in broad terms, English and German Romantic thought was fundamentally concerned with subjectivity and with the nature of individual experience. Russian Romanticism had as a distinguishing feature its preoccupation with subjecthood, or with the question of what it meant to be a Russian subject. 35 As Soviet scholar Lidiia Ginzburg demonstrates in her classic work on Russian Romanticism, the overlap between the conception of the individual and of the narod or nation was extensive in Russian literature, where thinkers perceived close ties between the conceptualizations of national identity and the individual persona (lichnost). 36 The nation was itself understood to be a "collective individual" and was best defined in terms of national character or persona. 37 Western thought had begun to address the issues of nation, national character, and civic identity as discrete problems already in the eighteenth century, but for the Russian liberal elite, many of whom were future Decembrists or their associates, the notion of selfhood was inextricably bound to the issue of Russianness. 38 The Russian Romantic hero was at once a public (civic) and a private persona, whose individual experiences were understood to represent those of an entire generation. 39 In a context such as this, where questions of individual and national consciousness arose simultaneously and with great force, the figure of the Russian writer acquired special importance as both the forger and key example of Russian subjectivity. The quintessential Romantic image of the homeless traveler or nomadic wanderer came to represent in the Russian context the problem of both the self and the nation: it was impossible as a Russian subject to feel "at home" in a place that was believed to be ahistorical, undefined, and not yet fully civilized; this dilemma was both given voice and perpetuated in literature. Russian concern with national self-definition in the first half of the nineteenth century existed in a society in which individual civic autonomy was severely restricted. As Iurii Lotman's work has shown, this situation encouraged a very significant emphasis on the forms of communication-speech and writing-as actions in and of themselves, even beyond the content of these communications. 40 Romanticism generally privileged the role of the writer, poet, and artist, but, again, this emphasis acquired different meaning in Russia, where it took on an extra political cast. Thus, "Pushkin," for example, served, even in his lifetime, as a symbolic representation of the national subject to a greater extent than did his Western European counterparts, such as Byron or Coleridge, poets who were arguably viewed by their contemporaries less as embodiments of English

18

A NAT ION AST RAY

subjectivity than as icons of individuality. The fact that any utterance, especially in the form of writing, was a political action in the Russian Romantic context is demonstrated by the biographies of the writers considered in this book, who suffered severe punishment for what they wrote, from Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Herzen's exiles to Chaadaev's house arrest and diagnosis of insanity. This book will consider, in part, how the act of "writing"-both in text and in behavior-was itself a historicizing one for both the self and the nation in the Russian setting.

Writing as Travel; Writing as Home The symbolic significance of travel in Russian literature is rooted in the role of travel as an important literary-cultural practice in Europe beginning in the seventeenth century. This practice, stemming both from the rise of social science and an emphasis on leisure, culminated in the definition of a modern, educated individual as someone who travels in a discerning way and who frequently leaves a written account or trace of his journey. The identification of travel with writing had important theoretical implications for both practices. In "Travel and Writing," his essay on iterology, or the "science of travel and writing," French critic Michel Butor suggests alternately that travel is a form of writing-that is, one leaves a trace of one's passage in the place traveled to and bears the mark of that placeand that writing is a form of travel-one travels mentally to other selves and places through the writing process. 41 Butor's formulation can be expanded on in meaningful ways for the purposes of this discussion: writing while traveling and/or about traveling also serves the opposite function; that is, it provides an imagined home or center point for the traveling author. The act of writing about "abroad" serves to continuously affirm a connection to a recollected center from which one is away. The space of writing is a center in and of itself; it acts as a centering point of reference for the writer-and as a continuous affirmation of the centrality of his/her subjectivity to his/her experience of the world. The act of traveling necessitates a separation from home; writing while traveling and about traveling serves to maintain a mental and often physical connection with that home even while it captures experience abroad. Writing about travel effectively inscribes or "houses" the journey in a text and ensures that a trace of one's passage through time and space remains for posterity. Itinerancy is in this way historicized; that which was mobile becomes affixed, even while it simultaneously contains the seeds of future mental travel on the part of later readers. For Russians concerned with their perceived exclusion from history, both in national and individual terms, travel writing would offer a unique medium by which to write against itinerancy. The relationship between writing, travel, and home is complex. & Abbeele

Introduction

19

demonstrates in Travel as Metaphor, home is definable only through one's absence from it; it is not fully knowable until it has been left, until one is no longer "at home." 42 Being at home implies a harmony with one's surroundings that does not allow for the act of observation from without, or for the possibility of delimiting or defining what home actually is. In this sense, home only exists in the space of travel; perhaps more concretely, it exists only in the space of writing about travel. Here, whether consciously or no, one writes to home and about home. In key texts of Russian arts and letters, including work by Dostoevsky, Goncharov, and Herzen, writing about or from abroad leads to a profound and unsettling discovery: the ability to view home from abroad is impossible in the Russian context. The protagonists of these texts suffer from a national malaise of homelessness-at-home, meaning that Russia, the place where they should feel at home, fails to offer a comfortable or certain identity; there is no home ground there. One can never get away from it, because it has not been defined; yet one can then never discover it from afar and define it. Thus departure from home/ the homeland is highly problematic: one cannot leave if one is already away; one cannot depart from a home that does not exist. Similarly, one cannot return to a non-existent home: one is away, but since there is no point of departure, there can be no point of origin to return to either. For the authors named above, the very attempt to travel casts this essential Russian paradox into stark relief. Real travel cannot be accomplished since one is at heart already an eternal traveler: always abroad, never able to return. 43 Departure and return are complex motifs in works such as Dostoevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions or Goncharov's Oblomov and Frigate Pallas, where the protagonists are unlikely eternal travelers, caught on the road, so to speak, but with no "home" to depart from or return to.

From Karamzin to Dostoevsky: Framing the Nomadic Wanderer in Russian Literature The first chapter of this book makes the unorthodox move of juxtaposing the beginning and endpoints of this discussion: Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveler and Dostoevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. Though written over 60 years apart, these two narratives serve as bookends to this discussion of the centrality of travel to the identity of educated, elite Russians. When considered together, these texts offer unique insights into the nature of the topos of Russian nomadism. While Karamzin's Letters portray what seems to be a successful passage between Russia and Western Europe, in which the traveler's carefully constructed cosmopolitan Russian identity remains intact, Dostoevsky's essay explicitly dismantles Karamzin's paradigm and replaces it with a disquieting vision of

20

A NAT I O N A S T RAY

Russians as permanent and homeless traveler-wanderers. Dostoevsky's Russians find themselves as much abroad in Russia as in the West; more troublingly, they are eternal travelers, incapable of completing acts of departure or return, who remain in a cultural no-man's-land between West and East. To expand on the rationale for this juxtaposition, I would note that, while the structure of this book is broadly chronological, the larger task is to examine the evolution of an idea. In considering Karamzin and Dostoevsky side by side, I use the first chapter to outline the dramatic contours of the phenomenon of travelas-identity and its stark complexities before moving to a closer consideration of the origins and nuances of this discourse in the ensuing chapters. The contrast between the two works allows the reader to understand the analytical frame that I am placing around the phenomenon of Russian nomadism, and to grasp its potency in a number of literary contexts in the nineteenth century. The book returns to Dostoevsky in Chapter 5 and in the Conclusion with a new and deeper grasp of the nomadic discourse present in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions and in the Pushkin speech. Dostoevsky's eventual portrayal of Russians as stymied travelers sets the stage for discussion throughout the book. In Chapter 2 I uncover the genealogy of the image of the nomadic Russian wanderer as it appears in Chaadaev's 1836 First Philosophical Letter. l look closely at the way in which this text-in conjunction with the Romantic self-fashioning of Chaadaev's biography-helped to establish an influential image of a rootless Russian writer-subject. In this chapter I consider how an Enlightenment discourse of opposition between the primitive and the modern, in conjunction with a Romantic emphasis on alienation, nationalism, and the philosophy of history, informs Chaadaev's work. In the case of Chaadaev's Letter, the symbol of the wanderer articulates not only the quintessential Romantic themes of alienation and homelessness, but also the perception of Russia as a "latecomer" to the stage of European history. Chapter 3 shifts to the early part of the nineteenth century to consider Pushkin in his role as the defining literary and cultural representation of the Russian Romantic subject. Here I consider the imagery of wanderers, travelers, and nomads as emblems of the Russian self in his Southern poems and journey to Arzrum (1835). The second theme of the book-that of the connection between writing, travel, and history-comes into sharp relief here. Pushkin's concern with his place in history has been well noted; I argue that it is in his writing about travel that these concerns are brought to the fore most prominently: writing captures the traveling author's experience while away, serves as a means ofleaving a trace of the self in the place traveled, and, perhaps most importantly, fixes the author's presence in history. The relationship between travel, writing, and history makes up the central concern ofJourney to Arzrum, a text that is not a travelogue

Introduction

21

so much as it is a text about travel and the Russian writer as an "eternal traveler." Here I also examine the relationship between Pushkin and Chaadaev and the image of Chaadaev in Pushkin's work. In Chapter 4 I read Goncharov's 1859 novel Oblomov and his 1858 travel prose work Frigate Pallas as closely related texts and as ones in which the topoi of frustrated return and impossible Russian homecoming are central. In this chapter I address the tensions surrounding the conceptualization of home and homeland in Frigate Pallas and the emergence of a seemingly homeless traveling Russian narrator. Specifically, I consider how Goncharov presents the narrator of Frigate Pallas as Oblomov-abroad. Frigate Pallas distills a key theme both in Goncharov's work and in Russian literature more generally-an acute sense of the loss of home coupled with a perceived confusion over the boundaries, identity-and even very existence of-a homeland. In Chapter 5 I trace the image of the Romantic Russian wanderer to the influential political emigreAlexander Herzen's 1852-1867 autobiographical text My Past and Thoughts. I argue that the image of a Russian wanderer forms an important organizing principle of My Past and Thoughts, on both thematic and structural levels. Here I examine how My Past and Thoughts (along with other texts) engages in a dialogue with the work of authors described in the previous chapters, positing Russian nomadism as a radical force that is in revolutionary opposition to the bourgeois and static West. As with the sections dealing with Karamzin, Dostoevsky, and Pushkin, this chapter centers around depictions of border crossing as key elements in the expression of Russian identity. The book concludes with a return to Dostoevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions and the Pushkin speech of 1880, both in Chapter 5 and in the Conclusion. In the Pushkin speech Dostoevsky specifically identifies "the Russian wanderer" as a phase of Russian national development. Here Dostoevsky elaborates to an extreme extent upon the association between wandering and Russian identity, pointing to the ongoing centrality of this image to Russian national thought in the twentieth century and beyond. Here I briefly consider some of these later incarnations of Russian nomadism and their link to a revolutionary identity. There are, of course, many other texts that would belong in this study were length and clarity not an issue. I have selected the particular texts described above because they are the most emblematic examples of the discourse of Russian nomadism. They are texts that either played a large part in establishing the phenomenon or in adding a new dimension or twist to the discourse at various points. Some examples have necessarily been lefi: out because they did not play the same foundational role. They are nonetheless important, and I mention the striking parallels that these works offer to my discussion throughout the book.

22

A NAT I O N A S T RAY

Notable examples include Alexander Radishchev's 1790 internal travelogue Journey from Saint Petersburg to Moscow, Mikhail Lermontov's 1840 novel A Hero of Our Time, and Nikolai Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls. Radishchev's travelogue, along with Karamzin's Letters ofa Russian Traveler, helped to draw a strong connection between the consideration of Russian identity and the practice of travel. The events surrounding its publication prefigured the scandal that erupted around the publication of Chaadaev's First Philosophical Letter in 1836. Lermontov's classic novel of Russia's encounter with its expanding southern borderlands, A Hero of Our Time, in many ways elaborates on the portrait of Pushkin's destructive or demonic Russian wanderers, Aleko and Onegin. Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, with its concluding iconic image of Russia reimagined as a flying troika, presents an anti-hero with strong, if unexpected, similarities to Goncharov's Oblomov: Chichikov the itinerant confidence man searches for a home just as fruitlessly (if in far more suspect terms) as the infamous stay-athome Oblomov. Finally, I do not directly address the large corpus of Russian nineteenth-century travel writing here, though the fact of its existence is a crucial component of the literary backdrop that helped to form the discourse of Russian nomadism. This body of work has been masterfully discussed elsewhere by the scholars Schonle, Dickinson, and Offord. My discussion is concerned more with the way in which the ideas of travel and itinerancy came to be perceived as a central component of an elite Russian identity, and less with the materiality of Russian travel writing itself.

CHAPTER

ONE

Tracing the Topos of the Eternal Russian Traveler Karamzin's Letters ofa Russian Traveler and Dostoevsky's U?inter Notes on Summer Impressions

Karamzin's 1797 Letters ofa Russian Traveler (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 NATION ASTRAY

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 ofa 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 that is implicit in Karamzin's text and yet plays a more central role than has been previously acknowledged. Unlike most of the other texts considered in this book, Letters and Winter Notes might be described as travelogues, though they are both unconventional.

Tracing the Topos ofthe Eternal Russian Traveler

25

They depict, in some measure, the actual travels of the authors; however, both engage in deliberate play with generic conventions and blur the boundaries between travel account and literary narrative to an unusual extent. These texts are thematically and stylistically concerned with borders, geographical and otherwise, and specifically with those between Russia and Europe. In the discussion that follows, I look closely at the manifestation of borders and the depiction of border crossing in these narratives for what they reveal about the interrelated phenomena of writing, travel, and national identity in Russian literature of the first part of the nineteenth century. In this way, I hope to illuminate the paradoxical figure of the eternal Russian traveler that would figure so prominently in nineteenth-century Russian national consciousness. Images and discussions of border crossing play a significant symbolic role in travel writing, as well as in other types of writing. The image of border crossing has far-reaching mythological, political, and other connotations; further, this image carries an array of potential meanings that relate to the articulation of national identity through travel and writing. 3 A juxtaposition of Karamzin's and Dostoevsky's texts-arguably, the two Russian texts central to the expression of problems of national self-identification in travel writing-reveals the special role of what I call (using Bakhtin's term) the chronotope of Russian border crossing. This chronotope of crossing, which may be constituted by a literal crossing of international or geographical boundaries or, more abstractly, as a crossing in the sense of departure from one place and arrival in another, from "home" to "away," forms an organizing principle of "texts about travel," or texts that are concerned with the idea of travel but do not necessarily strictly conform to the norms of a travelogue. The chronotope of crossing is one that will appear in other texts concerned with travel and Russian nomadic wandering discussed in this book, notably those by Pushkin, Goncharov, and Herzen. Crossing the Russian border occupies a key position in Karamzin's and Dostoevsky's narratives and forms a basis for comparison. The treatment of the border between Russia and Europe in Dostoevsky's Winter Notes proves to be a radical dismantling of Karamzin's earlier representation of it, with profound implications for the implied identity of the Russian traveler. Where Karamzin's late eighteenth-century Russian gentleman-traveler adopts a pose in which he can successfully depart from Russia, as well as return, and in which he can cross from the private or intimate spheres of home and homeland to the public, more anonymous sphere of "abroad," Dostoevsky's narrator proves unable to cross any border at all; instead, he is permanently stuck in the act of attempting to cross. 4 This condition-a state of dislocation or residence in a no-man's-land between borders-constitutes an identity of its own: an alienated, homeless, and rootless one that is figuratively nomadic.

26

A NATION ASTRAY

As I have noted in the Introduction, a discourse in which Russian identity was defined in terms of homeless wandering and a "nomadic" lack of belonging within domestic and national spheres was well established by the time Winter Notes appeared in print. The idea of Russia as a nomadic nation-that is, one that was characterized by a literal past of nomadic Mongol invasions and one in which there was a sense of figurative displacement or exclusion from the most advanced stages of European historical development-had become a powerful means of expressing collective national anxiety over Russia's status in the world. The text of Winter Notes enacts this paradigm of nomadic displacement and internal diaspora in several ways, but it does so most significantly through a dismantling of Karamzin's model of successful Russian border crossing. What is the paradigm for Russian travel that Letters creates? How does Karamzin's Russian traveler enact passage from home to away, or fulfill the essential actions of travel, departure and return? Are these as successful as they seem? I turn now to the constructions of departure and return in Karamzin's text before moving to Dostoevsky's deconstruction of these same paradigms.

Letters ofa Russian Traveler: Creating a Paradigm for Departure and Return The young Karamzin (1766-1826) completed a journey to Europe in 1789-1790 that lasted for a little over a year. On his return he published some of his carefully crafted letters in the Moscow Journal (Moskovski_i zhurnal, 1791). These detailed his travels to Germany, Switzerland, and Paris. The first complete edition of Letters was published only in 1801, or ten years after his return. The text is not based on real letters (Karamzin sent few actual letters while abroad), bur, rather, is a composite from other sources, notably travel books and scholarly texts. 5 Karamzin was especially influenced by Sterne's 1768 A Sentimental journey through France and Italy. Despite the European models that Karamzin drew on, his text is unusual for its detailed emphasis on the emotionally important moments of departure and reunion; these poles of feeling serve as important focal points of the narrative. 6 Indeed, it is the notions of absence and departure that provide the rationale for the very existence of Karamzin's narrative. The traveler purports to write a seemingly constant stream of letters that serve, consciously or no, to mitigate his absence at home and to capture his presence abroad, to continually recall home to this narrator's mind and to inscribe his foreign experience upon the "home ground" that is the letter itself. The fact of the letter signals the narrator's eventual return and acts as a proxy for the letter writer.

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The emphasis in Karamzin's text on the action of crossing the Russian border serves to reconcile his conflicting emotional states and to firmly establish an "at home" or interior space on one side of the border and an "away" or exterior space on the other side. Letters of a Russian Traveler, in fact, begins with a break: the first word of the text is rasstalsia ("I parted"), a word that pushes the acts of crossing and departure to the fore of the reader's consciousness.7 This initial break, presented in the perfective past tense, refers to Karamzin's emotional departure from his intimate social circle, but might be said to signal departure as the premise of the text as a whole. The traveler's leave-taking from his domestic circle of friends and family is a private act that is not described in Letters, but the emotional aftereffects of this rupture are vividly recalled throughout. The traveler's physical departure from his homeland, however, is described, and in great detail, from leaving his home in Moscow to his arrival in German territory at Mittau. The first three letters are written from within Russia's borders-from Tver', Narva, and Riga-and largely from within homeland space, an unusual move for a travel text, generally presumed to begin once the traveler is fully abroad. 8 For the Sentimental narrator of Letters, however, departure from the home circle constitutes a great enough sense of "away" to merit writing letters, though he has not yet traveled beyond the Russian border itself In effect, Karamzin's letters enact departure, not as the swiftly completed impulse for initiating correspondence, but as a process to be experienced by all involved: the traveler, his implied home audience, and the reader. This traveler does not initially move toward a destination (Western Europe), but, rather, moves away from a point of origin (home) for a prolonged, indefinite time period: "all the time I become more distant from you and shall continue to grow more distant." 9 The significance of travel, at least at this early point in the text, lies in departure from home rather than in the experience-or expectation-of new experiences abroad. 10 The tension between relinquishing friends yet continually conversing with them via epistolary means underlies Karamzin's construction of departure as an elongated process, one that is accomplished in significant stages and that draws the reader's attention to its importance. The emphasis on process suggests that Russia is large and that there is a distance to travel from Moscow to Russia's outer limit. It reveals the presence of important boundaries within this space for the Russian traveler: home, Russia proper (or homeland), and imperial space. Yet this process of departure is important in personal terms as well, for it reveals something crucial about the traveler. In his first letter, Karamzin's narrator recalls the excitement he felt in anticipation of his trip. When the day of departure arrives, however, the traveler-to-be realizes that his longed-for travels are not simply about setting off to see new places, but that they also entail taking leave of one's intimate circle and, more broadly, moving from the private world of

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the known and familiar into the unfamiliar, public world of abroad. The day of departure constitutes an important step in the narrator's authorial transition from a friend-or member of a domestic, inner circle-to a traveler and outside observer, who, though still connected to home by the device of the letter, is no longer at home. The nature of this spontaneous recollection asserts that Karamzin was "at home" before he left, or was on the verge of leaving, that he was, at one point, fully and harmoniously integrated with his domestic surroundings such that he was not aware of himself as being "at home." The narrator does not-indeed, cannot-describe what came before his awareness of impending departure, that is, what it was to be at home. As we have seen, the fact or idea of home is not conceivable until it has been left: being truly "at home" precludes the possibility of comment upon its existence. 11 Letters embodies this paradox nicely: the state of "at home" is alluded to in the first letter yet never described: its inception as a conscious category in the text occurs only at the moment of leave-taking. A similar awareness is profoundly felt upon the narrator's return, as we will see below. Karamzin's departure, then, is a truly significant rupture, for it is understoodin retrospect-to have been a departure from himself, from what has gone into the making of himself up to this point: "When the longed-for day arrived, I began to feel sad once I imagined truly for the first time that it meant taking leave of the people who were dearest to me in the world, and leaving everything that might be said to be a part of the moral structure of my existence." 12 Departure constitutes a rupture in space and in time, with the pre-travel fl.ow of life now made the irrevocable past. Karamzin's traveler leaves a place, as any traveler does, but it is not simply a point of departure; rather, he is leaving his own point of origin, that place in which he came into being. As the passage suggests, he conceives of it as such only in the moment of departure itself, when "home" takes shape as the thing that is being left behind. The home of pre-departure time and space is distilled in the image of the traveler's room in his house in Moscow, and this room is full of objects to which he bids farewell as if they were "friends." Even more significantly, he refers to them as pamiatniki-monuments or relics of the past created by the fact of his impending departure: "in a word, everything that came into view evoked the cherished recollection of the past years of my life [.... ] I parted from inanimate objects as though from friends." 13 The objects in Karamzin's room are poignant because they embody traces of the narrator from the time before he conceived of departure; the room serves as a museum of the self as it was when he was at home. The room itself will remain unchanged while the traveler is away; however, he will not return to it in time even if he does return in space. The fact that he cannot return to his predeparture self transforms the room from an inhabited dwelling space-a home-

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into a mausoleum. This memorial to Karamzin's past self plays a powerful role in the text of Letters. While the room/mausoleum is not directly recalled again, it functions as a mental image of home that Karamzin carries with him and as the point of origin to which he is meant to eventually return. The initial letter from Tver' (a day's journey northwest of Moscow) details the traveler's departure from his room, his social circle, and Moscow, thus unveiling diverse layers of his point of origin, from the most intimate and personal to the public or communal. This letter demonstrates to the reader the narrator's essential "at-homeness" in all three of these spheres. Importantly, his departure from this home point enacts a fundamental transition to a state of away, which translates here into a "homeless" condition: "There I took my seat in my carriage, glanced at Moscow where so much that is dear to me remained, and said: Adieu! The bell began to ring, the horses flew off... and your friend was instantly orphaned in the world and orphaned in my soul!" 14 Departure from the enclosed world(s) of home means the loss of those things that confer identity-home, family. For the Russian traveler, orphanhood commences at the Moscow city gates. This primary scene of departure in Letters is a critical one: the Russian traveler is an orphan, and a link has been made between travel and homelessness. This link will prove to be a powerful association, one that will undergo various permutations in key works of Russian literature in later decades of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the nominal presence of friendly and familial ties in the form of the letters themselves serves as the raison d'etre for Karamzin's text; the letters provide an implicit audience, and a means of retaining a connection with his past, or of appearing to bridge the gap between the traveler and his point of origin. The existence of the letters points to travel as a motivation for writing, and they suggest that departure from home demands a record of one's experience in absentia. The letters themselves are, like the objects in his room, souvenirs or relics of Karamzin's experience, for they are the representation of the time and space he experienced abroad. The narrator's anxiety over departure from his friends and from his own past is assuaged by the presence of letter-doubles that return in his stead to his pre-departure world. Further, the letters themselves are a kind of home space: in writing to home (or pretending to) the narrator can temporarily mentally dwell at home in the very process of writing. The narrator is thus both abroad and at home in the act of writing of the letter.

Narva and Riga: Liminal Spaces of the Russian Empire Although rendered figuratively homeless by this rupture with his familiar-and familial-world, Karamzin has not yet completed the process of departure: he has

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not left the confines of the Russian empire, and he has not crossed an international border. Two more letters appear from within Russia's borders, one from Saint Petersburg and a second describing his journey through Narva and Riga. These last two towns lie to the west of Saint Petersburg in the Baltic borderlands acquired by Russia in the early eighteenth century. 15 Though not far from the capital, Narva and Riga, like Saint Petersburg itself, are, for the Muscovite narrator, spaces that are foreign enough and far enough from home to warrant writing letters. When he arrives in Narva, Karamzin is still in Russia, but he has nevertheless crossed an important, if unmarked, border-that of Russia proper. The approach to Narva and the northwestern edge of the Russian empire is not free of complications. Terrible weather, in combination with a carriage upset, forces Karamzin to experience his newfound homelessness in perilous terms, such that he considers returning to the friends from whom he so recently parted. Fortunately for the narrator, he is rescued by a local German family, whose kindness allows him to overcome the last physical and emotional hurdles to departure from Russia proper. Indeed, sitting around the table with them in their modest home suggests the possibiliry of enacting domesticity even while on the road. Karamzin comments philosophically on the crisis surrounding his imminent departure: "Everything has its limit; the wave breaking on the bank subsides or falls down again after reaching a height." 16 Here, the reference to limits echoes the narrator's own encounter with boundaries: he has crossed a significant national border (for lack of a better term) at Narva, and in doing so has completed the second stage of a tripartite departure from home, homeland, and empire. 17 He has also rehearsed "homeless" travel in a quasi-foreign space, only to discover that temporary shelter can be found on the road. He is not, after all, utterly alone, despite being a spiritual orphan, but departure from Russia is a noteworthy event, a passage marked by turbulence and distress. When Karamzin reaches Narva, he notes that the city used to be the site of the Russian border. 18 It is still divided into two parts: that which is properly called Narva and is German, and the Russian section, called "lvan-gorod." While no longer the actual border, the town itself still embodies a powerful cultural division between Russia and the Germanic Baltics. Riga is a "border town" and not representative of Russia. 19 It is even less Russian than Narva: "Everywhere you go you hear German, occasionally Russian; and everywhere it is thalers and not rubles that are in demand." 20 Language plays an important role as the marker of the shift in power and influence. To this end, Karamzin notes the mix of German and Slavic words in the language of the Estonians and Lithuanians: border peoples speak a "border" language. Despite political control, Russia's cultural influence is clearly weak in the Baltics. 21 In a further mark of the lessening reach of Russian influence, Karamzin stays in the Hotel de

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Petersbourg in Riga: the French spelling of the (German) name of the Russian capital suggests the town's peripheral relationship to the real Saint Petersburg, as well as its geographical proximity to another center, France. Notably, upon arrival in the periphery, Karamzin engages less overtly in the Sentimental mode of farewell and begins to pay more attention to his quasi-foreign surroundings. Personal, national, and imperial identity intersect in an intriguing fashion in the first several pages of Letters: Karamzin crosses the personal boundary of home when he leaves his social sphere, and he leaves the heart of Russia when he leaves Moscow for Saint Petersburg. He leaves Russia proper at Narva. His final act of departure is from the geopolitical realm of the Russian empire, only left behind when he crosses out of the Baltics into Germany at Mittau. Though he describes himself as having already been abroad for quite some time, 22 and as having already noted differences in people, landscape, and customs, departure from the imperial sphere is a highly significant and distinctly defined action in Letters. Indeed, Karamzin takes careful note of crossing into the world beyond the borders of the fatherland. This crossing is important in that he is now freed from his lingering regrets at leaving home, and can look at the foreign space around him with newly observant eyes: the thought that I was outside my own country caused a great and surprising stir in my soul. I gazed most attentively at everything that came my way, despite the fact that the objects themselves were entirely ordinary. I felt a happiness such as I had not felt since our separation, friends. Soon Mittau was before us. The city does not offer a pleasant prospect, but for me it was attractive. Here is my first foreign city, I thought, as my eyes sought out something excellent and new. 23

Foreignness renders an otherwise unattractive Mittau charming, as indeed, perhaps it should, for Karamzin here succeeds in seeing what later Russian writers such as Herzen and Dostoevsky will claim not to be able to see, even when ostensibly in foreign places: foreignness itself. Others, like Pushkin, who travels to arguably more exotic locales than Mittau in his time, never succeed in crossing out of Russian territory and so never have the opportunity to view this much-vaunted "foreignness" with their own eyes. Karamzin's narrator has traveled far in just a few pages, from the interior space of his room to the world beyond the boundaries of the Russian empire. The emphasis on the temporal and spatial aspects of departure has formed a layered and elongated border that is marked by degrees of separation from the traveler's home, or core, self. Limits, breaks, and ruptures are counteracted by the extension of the border-the text's focus is on the ruptur-ing, the departing as processes that result at length in completed actions. After this point in

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Letters, the narrator's pose of sadness at the loss of his friends all but vanishes from the text, except when it appears in a perfunctory fashion at the end of his letters; indeed, he even feels happiness at the sight of the foreign. This Russian traveler has successfully departed from a familiar space to a foreign one, from home to away, and he has undergone a transformation into a traveling writer (or writing traveler), whose letters serve as mobile representations of himself and yet connect him to his point of origin. Home, homeland, and empire are entities that appear to be distinct (unusually so for an eighteenth-century Russian text) and unproblematically aligned in the opening of Letters. But such a tidy arrangement of borders will not be sustained in Russian literary consciousness; rather, the confusion, absence, or distortion of these very important territories will give rise to the image of an imagined Russian national traveler who is unable in the broadest sense to depart from, return to, or even locate, home, here defined as the space encompassing both the personal and the national domestic sphere. 24

Return to Russia: The Chronotope of Crossing Completed In light of the traveler's extended departure, it is not surprising that return to Russia is similarly represented in detail at the end of the narrative, and that it is also a process that is completed in stages. The epistolary form that has served to maintain the narrator's connection to home over temporal and spatial distance can no longer serve its function; it cannot encompass the actual moment of reunification with the letters' addressees. The question arises, then, as to how return is constructed in Letters. When does distance cease? When is the traveler no longer abroad? Is it when he reaches the imperial border? Saint Petersburg? The threshold of home? These questions, provoked by the opening pages, hover over the concluding letters. Karamzin returns to Russia by sea, and this return journey across the ocean offers a different dynamic than land passage through the imperial territory. The ocean serves as a liminal, non-territorialized space unmarked by imperial or national borders. As such, it is more abstract and allows the narrator to meditate on the metaphysical quandary of home versus away without negotiating national versus imperial boundaries. While at sea, Karamzin's traveler is literally between places, and this lack of spatial fixity is reflected by the simple heading "Ocean" that he places on two of his three final letters. Unlike the rest of the letters, which are faithfully marked by date and place, these three provide no geographical or temporal coordinates. It is as if the ocean passage existed outside of time and space, and it is here that a potential failure to return is contemplated for the first time. As Karamzin travels in the unmarked, "unposted" space of the ocean,

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morbid reflections on his own demise enter into the text. 25 These last letters are marked by the narrator's recounting of the story of a young woman named Maria who fell ill and died in Karamzin's cabin on the ship's previous voyage. She had been traveling from New York to be reunited with her lover in London. This story of failed reunion haunts the Sentimental Karamzin and raises questions of his own mortality: "The die is cast, I thought: let us see whether this bed will be my grave!" 26 In Gothic fashion, a terrible rainstorm appears-notably similar to the earlier one at Narva-and Karamzin bemoans the fact that he is now penniless, having spent all but his last guinea. It is highly significant that morbid fears emerge for the narrator with such force at this point in the text. Crossing the ocean suggests a symbolic passage between life and death in its own right, but the proximity of return to the homeland also recalls the traveler's orphaned state at the beginning of the novel (now he is penniless to boot), and brings to the fore an anxiety over a potential failure to return. Leaving home opens up the possibility for the traveling Karamzin that he might not come back, an issue that arises, not, as one might expect, far away in Paris, where the traveler is presented with the opportunity of choosing an alternate life abroad, but just as he reaches the threshold of home itsel£ This is the moment where he must reconcile his recollected vision of home with the real entity, and as such it is a moment of heightened anxiety. For Karamzin, such concerns are made all the more worrisome when he discovers that the body of the young woman who died in his cabin was, according to standard practice, thrown into the sea after her death. An alarmed Karamzin asks of the captain whether the same would be done with his body if he were to die on board: Imagine, the unfortunate girl was thrown into the sea! Imagine, I am sleeping in her bed! ... "Would you throw me in the sea in the same way," I say to the captain, "if I died on your ship?" "What else can you do?" he answers, shrugging his shoulders. This is terrible! Earth, earth! Prepare in your quiet bowels a secluded little spot for my remains! It is bad enough to be carried along the waves when we are alive; but to be the plaything of the tempestuous elements afi:er death as well is something terrible! 27

To be buried at sea is a dreadful fate by any measure, but it is particularly so because it represents an ultimate orphaning: under the waves there are no sheltered spots, no tombstones or markers-no pamiatniki-to establish the trace of one's presence on earth or to connect one to a domestic center. Worse still, bodies buried at sea continue to travel even after death. This is an especially unsettling proposition for Karamzin the traveling writer, who has spent the last many months sending home epistolary indications of his eventual return. If he were never to return, the cyclical nature of his journey would not be fulfilled, and

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his traveling self would never be reunited with his point of origin. Further, his life's journey would not be marked by the appropriate endpoint, or last word, of a tombstone. This traveler wants to complete his return-even in death-to his fatherland. Burial elsewhere would constitute a disappearance from home that could not be restored. As if to underscore what is at stake for the traveling writer, these return letters are full of heightened emotion: the first letter has many exclamation points, unusual even for the effusive Karamzin, and several times he emphasizes that he is returning to his fatherland (otechestvo). 28 His apparent solitude and poverty during the sea crossing, along with his fear of a watery grave, recall the distress he felt at the beginning of the text upon leaving Moscow and his friends. The frequent repetition of the word otechestvo as he approaches the Russian border stresses the idea of homeland as a familial space, suggesting that return to Russia will reinstate Karamzin in a national family and resolve the orphanhood initiated by departure. The familial connotation of otechestvo here nearly outweighs the importance of Russia as a specific place. Instead, the term collapses personal and national categories into one, signaling return to both his domestic circle and his national sphere. Whether these spheres can truly be so collapsed is a question left unresolved in Letters; however, it is one that will arise for writers such as Goncharov in his travels across Siberia in the 1850s. There is one final border: Karamzin reaches land at Kronstadt, the small port island thirty kilometers west of Saint Petersburg. This spot marks return as the narrative ends there. Karamzin's return echoes his departure in condensed terms. Just as he noted the presence of the German language in Narva and Riga, Karamzin now proclaims his delight at hearing Russian. Mittau was interesting, if only for its foreignness; Kronstadt-normally a "horrible town" -now appears to be a wonderful place because it is not foreign, because it offers the first familiar impression: "I am in Russia [ .... ] I stop everybody, I ask them questions just in order to speak Russian and to hear Russian people. You know how difficult it is to find a city worse than Kronstadt; but I like it! The local inn could be called the hotel of beggars, but I find it agreeable!" 29 Russia has not disappeared in Karamzin's absence; the fatherland proves to be a place one can leave from and return to-it has a more or less stable, independent existence on its side of the border. Karamzin has succeeded in leaving Russia, in writing a connection between the far reach of his travels and the recollected center point of home, and in returning to Russia. Notably, however, the homecoming is not complete. Letters does not include a representation of return to the starting point-of return through Saint Petersburg to Moscow and to the threshold of his own home and to his friends, so attentively left behind. Such an enactment would be impossible, if only

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because the moment of reunion with the letters' purported addressees marks the end of spatial distance and can hardly be captured in yet another letter. And yet, the beginning of the text has created an expectation of this return to the center point. What does Karamzin's room look like now? How does the narrator feel at being reunited with the relics of his former self? Such a moment of reunion might well have been described in a postscript to the text, but it does not appear. Its absence is suggestive: the traveler does not return to the point of origin so fully described in the beginning of Letters because he cannot. That room, that house, those friends no longer exist exactly as he left them and has remembered them ever since. Indeed, the traveler of Letters has himself been changed by his experiences and is no longer who he was when he left. 30 He has new mementos, or monuments of the self, those that he collected on his travels, and these-his notes, receipts, dried leaves, as well as the letters he wrote-are now the focus of his attention: "I am going through my [travel] treasures with such pleasure." 31 He describes himself as rereading his letters, objects that are now a "mirror of my soul over the course of eighteen months." 32 Indeed, so changed is he that he does not desire to return to his old room at all, but instead rhetorically asks his friends to prepare him a new home, a "clean cottage" (opriatnaia khizhinka) in which he "might freely enjoy the Chinese [shadows] of my imagination, be sad in my heart and find consolation with friends." 33 The vision of this cottage is very significant: a new self requires a new home; or, rather, it requires a new museum or place to enshrine Karamzin's experiences while abroad. Now Karamzin will be a permanent visitor at this museum, repeatedly "going through" his treasures and recalling his experiences abroad. This is not the same as being at home, or as returning to a state of unconscious harmony with his surroundings such as existed before his departure. Perhaps this is the price paid for traveling at all: Karamzin cannot return to the state of "at home": instead he will always be aware of the contrasting realms of home and away. In a paradoxical manner, "away" is now a home space for Karamzin; it is the recollected state in which he was simply away from home (meaning that "at home" existed, if only in memory) and not away at home. The initial rupture, so minutely described in the first three letters, makes its presence felt here at the very moment of return: despite Karamzin's apparent joy at reunion, he is not restored to his former self. The Russian traveler of Letters returns to his homeland, but, curiously, the reader is not shown how this reintegration transpires, nor do we witness any happy reinstatement to the domestic hearth. The narrator remains physically located in the port town of Kronstadt-literally, at the Russian border. Perhaps this failure to cross back, to complete the chronotope of crossing, is a more significant lacuna in Karamzin's text than it initially appears to be. It is not simply a convenience or standard feature of travel writing. In this model of incomplete return-to the

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border, but not to home life-an opening is left in the text for future Russian literary travelers to fall into, such as Chatskii, Onegin, and Oblomov, not to mention Pechorin or Chichikov: travelers who may physically return to Russia, or even never leave its borders, yet never find a place at the Russian domestic hearth and are doomed to a life of eternal travel. 34 The absence of a paradigm for reintegration and reunion within the domestic spheres of home and homeland in Letters may well be as influential in its own way as that of Karamzin's figure of the Russian traveler himself Once away, always away-the Russian traveler, to echo Chaadaev, is now something of a stranger in his own family. He may physically come back to Russia, but only as a traveler who has seen other places and who forever now belongs at least a little bit to those places. Karamzin's literary pose of the successful traveler-a Russian who crosses borders-is, beneath the surface, a deeply paradoxical one. It is precisely the ambivalent nature of this pose that will prove to be so troublesome to later writers and that will operate so powerfully in Dostoevsky's influential essay Winter Notes.

W'inter Notes on Summer Impressions: The Chronotope of Crossing Dismantled While much about the historical context has changed, the text of Winter Notes on Summer Impressions-the 1863 account of Dostoevsky's first trip to Western Europe-is engaged in an explicit critique of Karamzin's paradigmatic Russian traveler. 35 letters places great emphasis on the processes of departure and return, and it is a text with a high awareness of the symbolic value of borders. In Winter Notes, borders and border crossing play an important role in linking the question of national identity-the central concern of the text-explicitly to travel and writing. In so doing, Winter Notes participates in a broader discourse of Russian nomadism, the subject of discussion in the ensuing chapters. In this section, however, discussion will center on some of the many ways that the Karamzinian chronotope of crossing-of completing departure and return-is dismantled in Winter Notes, a narrative gesture that lays bare the more troubling aspects of Karamzin's image of the Russian traveler. Dostoevsky could not write a travel text without awareness of Karamzin's fundamental example, and indeed, he places his narrator in the tradition of Russian literary travel by directly alluding to Karamzin and to Fonvizin, the other progenitor of Russian travel literature. 36 The extent, however, to which Winter Notes makes use, or disuse, of the border paradigm from Letters to create the figure of a nomadic double to Karamzin's Russian traveler has not been explored by scholars. While Dostoevsky's views on Europe and the West as expanded on in Winter Notes are well known, the way

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in which Winter Notes engages with the idea of a figuratively nomadic national identity remains to be examined. As we have seen, when Karamzin's traveler leaves for Europe in Letters of a Russian Traveler, he leaves a society to which he purports to belong. He leaves from and returns to the spheres of his fatherland and his intimate social circle in a seemingly orderly fashion, and he relates his travelogue chronologically and in the present tense, strategies that create the illusion that it has been written "on the road." In contrast, Dostoevsky's traveling narrator abandons the conventional concerns of the travelogue-experience in a delimited space and time-and instead makes use of the travel text as a vehicle for commenting directly on Russian identity in relation to the West. In this vein, the text is almost wholly concerned with the theme of displaced, lost, or missing borders, and the apparently borderless, or border-confused, Russians presented in Dostoevsky's "travelogue" demonstrate a profoundly unfixed identity. 37 In this paradigm, the Russian educated elite no longer possess any true or original identity, but only the memory of one. 38 This elite figure fluctuates between identity poles: he is aware of the otherness of the Russian narod and convinced of its barbarity, yet he is still tied to it by a certain native connection. At the same time, he is himself consumed and displaced by a derivative version of European identity. 39 Where Karamzin's traveler negotiates an identity in which he is both Russian and European, and can exist at home and abroad, Dostoevsky's Russian is consumed by the inherent tensions of such a position and by the seeming absence of a positive identity. The image of the cosmopolitan, urbane traveler in Letters, at home everywhere, is negatively framed in Winter Notes in a manner that exposes the disquieting aspects of this pose: Dostoevsky's Russian traveler is "at home" nowhere. He is so Europeanized as to be a colonial subject or foreigner in his own country, yet he remains a foreigner abroad. The central dilemma of Winter Notes is the concern over a boundary that is not geographical, but cultural, and it is one that has been internalized in the consciousness of the educated Russian elite. This boundary between "Europe" and "Russia'' is echoed by a further division within Russia between the elite and the people (narod). The alienation experienced by Dostoevsky's traveling narrator both at home and abroad creates a paradox: his permanent awayness in both spheres makes it difficult for him to cross actual borders, be they international, national, or personal. He cannot complete the act of departure from Russia, much less return. 40 There are many ways in which Winter Notes plays with the notion of borders, whether they are transgressed, as in the conventions of the genre, or exist in surprising places (or fail to appear where they should). Dostoevsky's text should be characterized as disorderly, even dis(b) orderly: boundaries are largely observed only in order to point out their absence,

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or failure to enclose, separate, or distinguish between entities. 41 In contrast to the extreme orderliness of German, French, and English society, as posited by W'inter Notes, the narrator's disorderliness establishes him as his own kind of distinctively Russian traveler-one who emerges as the antithesis of Karamzin's cosmopolitan, urbane gentleman-traveler.

The Border Vanishes Dostoevsky is hardly the first writer to create a parodic or ironic travelogue, but the way in which the traveling narrator of W'inter Notes frustrates the expectations of the genre illuminates elements of a larger discourse in which Russian identity is perceived as unfixed or unstable. The narrator does not describe his travels chronologically, but changes his temporal and spatial position constantly-a move the title itself seems to imply. In contrast to Letters ofa Russian Traveler, which is centered around the traveler's task of observing Western Europe (i.e., cities like Berlin), Dostoevsky's text repeatedly-and deliberately-loses sight of the "proper" objects of observation. The most notable failure of his travelogue, however, is the continual disappearance of the border between Russia and Europe itself. While the chronotope of passage from home to abroad is present in W'inter Notes, the scenario is very different from that of Karamzin's extensive treatment of the passage from home to away, and from national to foreign space. Here the crucial moment of crossing the border into Western Europe happens "offstage" and is not experienced in the text. Like Letters, the experience of the border crossing is elongated in Winter Notes, but only because the experience is so confused, displaced, and fragmented that the reader is not sure if or when it has taken place. This draws the reader's attention to the border in a new way: departure is a central event, as it was for Karamzin, but Dostoevsky calls attention to the fact that departure cannot take place. Twice the narrator announces that he is in the train approaching Eidkuhnen, the border between Russia and Germany, and the reader is led to expect some description of this important moment. These expectations are frustrated, however, as the narrator is seemingly distracted from a description of the crossing itself into a disquisition on the problems of Russian national identity. The nearer he comes to the border, the more he is concerned with Russianness, with looking behind him rather than forward, so much so that he misses the actual border: But what is this? Where could I have wandered off to? Where could I have seen Russians abroad? After all we are still coming to Eydkuhnen ... Or have we already

passed it? Indeed, we have, and Berlin and Dresden and Cologne-we have passed

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them all. It is true, we are still in the train car, but before us is not Eydkuhnen, it is Erquelines, and we are entering France. It is Paris, Paris, that's what I wanted to talk about after all, and I have forgotten! Instead, I have meditated at length on our Russian Europe, an excusable affair when you are yourself going to see European Europe. Besides there is really no reason to beg your pardon. After all, my chapter is superfluous. 42

In this memorable passage, the border vanishes from the text, where it is replaced with an ellipsis. The "first foreign impression"-the object of Karamzin's close attention in Letters-has likewise been missed, as has any notice of departure from home or from homeland. The narrator's external disarray is the result of internal confusion: he is, in a peculiarly Russian sense, incapable of keeping his thoughts in order. He speaks of Russia when he meant to talk of Paris. His mind wanders to the imaginary territory of "Russian Europe," not the part of Russia located on the European continent, but the version of Europe found in the Russian imagination. This native vision of Europe interferes with the Russian traveler's ability to see the real Europe. Additionally, the chapter in which the border crossing from Russia to Europe occurs is labeled as superfluous, in part to reflect the fact that its readers-elite Russians-are already Europeanized and have already crossed the border in psychological or cultural terms. Also, the narrator and others like him are themselves superfluous-they are "Russian-Europeans," or creatures of a place that does not exist on any map. The real border does not lie at the geographical point of Eidkuhnen, but rather is found in an imaginary space between Russia and Europe that cannot be located geographically. 43 In addition to the disappearance of the real Russian-European border, borders vanish from Dostoevsky's text in other significant ways. Major European cities such as Berlin appear in the wrong place or, as is the case with Paris, fail to be seen at all. When Dostoevsky's sick, and hence unreliable, traveling narrator reaches Berlin, he makes a surprising discovery: "I, a sick man [... ] bounced along the railway for two days through rain and fog to Berlin; once arriving there

[... ]I suddenly noticed at a glance that Berlin resembled Petersburg to an incredible degree[ .... ] 'Oh, my God,' I thought to myself. 'Was it worth wearing myself out for two days in a train car just to see the same thing I left behind?'"44 Motion sickness has brought on double vision, for the narrator sees Saint Petersburg where he should see Berlin, an event suggesting that, despite his two-day train trip, he has not traveled anywhere at all. It would seem that Saint Petersburg is not a real city, but rather a reflection of Berlin as seen from within Russia. This seepage of the West into the East pushes the Russian border farther East, to a hazy distance beyond Saint Petersburg. Dostoevsky's apparent failure to arrive in Berlin, or abroad, results in a generic failure for Winter Notes. The crucial

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chronotope of crossing, so explicitly present in Karamzin's text, is absent from Dostoevsky's. Can Winter Notes be considered a text about travel if the narrator does not travel to any given place? Berlin phantasmagorically appears where it should not, spreading beyond its natural boundaries; the city of Paris displays the opposite tendency. A crucial destination for generations of Russian and other travelers, it fails to be seen in Dostoevsky's text at all. 45 The narrator claims that he is in Paris, but he refuses to describe what he sees there: "And so I am in Paris ... Do not think, however, that I am going to tell you much about the city of Paris itsel£ I think you have read so much about it in Russian already that you must finally be sick of it. Not only that, you have been there yourselves and have probably noted everything better than I." 46 This comment is an inversion of Karamzin's arrival in Paris, as described in Letters. The earlier Russian traveler states more than once "I am in Paris!" and he stresses that he will present his reader with a vivid picture of Paris itself, the "model for all Europe" and the "greatest and most famous city in the world." 47 And he proceeds to do just that, devoting thirty-two letters (and over one hundred pages) to his time there, which notably coincides with the outset of the French Revolution. In Winter Notes, however, the implied Russian reader is assumed to already know Paris well. It is not noteworthy because it is, in fact, not foreign. It is even less foreign, apparently, than Berlin, a city which could at least be noticed, even if only in its similarity to Saint Petersburg. There is an expectation that a description of Paris should form a central element of a Russian text about travel in Western Europe, however, so the failure to write about it is crucial. Lest the reader miss this violation of the genre's norms, the narrator points it out to the reader frequently with statements such as the following: "But there I go again! Once more, I am not in Paris ... When, Lord, will I accustom myself to order ... ?" 48 This unseen or invisible Paris functions in Winter Notes in two ways. First, the Dostoevskian narrator fails to see Paris because he already is Parisian in a manner of speaking: it is home, by dint of Russian elite assimilation of French culture; as such, it cannot be perceived as something new or different by the Russian reader already culturally colonized by the French. Second, the absence of Paris sustains a broader claim in Winter Notes that the French are inauthentic, that they are imitators and fakers, an accusation more commonly leveled at Russian society for its adulation of all things French. Drawing on a Russian tradition of viewing French culture as theatrical and artificial-one propagated by writers ranging from Fonvizin to Herzen-Dostoevsky makes reference to ladies who use strategically placed dress pins to improve their appearance as a metaphor for French society, suggesting that French culture is itself staged. If French society is a charade, then there is nothing authentic to see in their (faux) capital. Further,

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a Russian identity predicated on the imitation of what is itself staged-French life-becomes demonstrably absurd. 49

The Disorderly Narrator The displacement and dismantling of borders in Winter Notes described above is further underscored by disruptions of other varieties in the text, notably the distortion of the temporal sequence and the failure to observe the proper subject matter. The text begins in Russia after the narrator has returned from his trip, but then moves backward, returning the narrator variously to Berlin, Dresden, and Paris, or to the train approaching the Russian border. The subject of the narration shifts radically as well-from the disappointing cathedral at Cologne to promises of a description of Paris and a discussion of Russian literature. Despite the narrator's pretense that he is still abroad, the reader has already been informed of the trip's completion in the first few lines of the text, and the title of the work (Winter Notes on Summer Impressions) further belies the traditional premise of "on the road" reportage. The disruptive narrator confuses the narrative on a textual level as well. French phrases appear in the Russian text, and the "superfluous chapter" is inserted into the middle of the travelogue. The narrator is easily distracted: he frequently interrupts himself to discuss Russian literature when he has asserted that he will talk about Paris, or to comment on Russian society when he "should" remark on Europe. The text strays far from its prescribed course of outward observation. In fact, the disorderly narrator cannot write about a foreign country without exposing himself to view. This is an underlying facet of all travel writing, but in Winter Notes it is the central conceit. Hence the narrator's credibility as an observer is strained when the usual relationship between the traveler and the "traveled" is blatantly reversed. Dostoevsky only becomes aware of his presence in France when he discovers that he is the object of French observation. Themes of observation, and more specifically surveillance, are closely linked to his presence there. A fellow passenger from Switzerland informs the narrator that the men who briefly entered their train compartment after they crossed the French border were French government spies whose task it was to take note of the travelers. While the narrator sees but does not notice them, these government agents have observed him closely. When the narrator arrives at his hotel, he reports that he is asked by the hotel proprietors to give several details about himsel£ Rather than describe the hotel and its owners, the narrator provides the reader with the telling personal details the hotel owners have observed in him: he is of medium height and has straight blond hair, light

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gray eyes, and a small scar on his brow. 50 We learn little of the owners-husband and wife-except that they communicate with each other wordlessly, using their eyes. This method of communication, coupled with the incident on the train, suggests that spying is a favorite pastime in France. The unobservant narrator does not realize that he is the center of attention until he is informed of it by the wife of the hotel owner, who asks him for his social position. He considers answering that he is both traveler (puteshestvennik) and writer (homme des lettres), thus underlining his doubled role as observer. But in fact, his trip to France entails relinquishing this role, as we can see clearly if we contrast his attitude toward seeing and being seen with that of the French. The power of the French bourgeoisie lies in their steadfast refusal to allow anyone to observe them. According to the narrator, they shrink from the gaze of potential observers, waving them on and imploring: "pretend you don't see me, pass on by, pass on by!" 51 Their inauthenticity may render them invisible, but in this case such invisibility is a form of power. In contrast, the Russian traveler, by his own admission, ventures to France not to see, but to experience firsthand "being seen"; he feels himself to be truly "abroad" only when he is objectified by others as a foreigner. Like an object for consumption or display, Dostoevsky's Russian traveler allows the French to "take him in" visually while he himself observes little. If we recall that Karamzin traveled in part to view himself and his homeland in the "mirror" that Europe provided, 52 we see that Dostoevsky has turned this proposition on its head in Winter Notes-travel to Europe reveals that the narrator is the mirror in which Europe views itself Dostoevsky's traveler is an instrument of reflection, not perception. There is an irony in the fact that he is so culturally "at home" in France that he cannot actually perceive Paris and yet Paris perceives him, if only as a foreign object. Further complicating the disorderly nature of Winter Notes are the narrator's digressions on Russian literature. In this vein, Griboedov's 1824 play Woe from Wit (Gore ot uma), with its attack on Russian Gallomania, forms an important point of reference in Winter Notes. Literature becomes the subject of a discourse purportedly about "real" experience, and the discussion of Russian character is literally that-a discussion of characters-when Chatskii and other figures from the play are made to stand in for "real" social types. National identity, as already demonstrated in the critique of the French, is a theatrical construct, so it is fitting that the character of the Russian elite is shown here to derive from a play, and to be born of fictional expectations. As is made clear in the narrator's anecdote about a barin's attempts to blend in with the narod, authentic national identity has been subsumed for the elite by the act of representing it: "Not long ago I heard that a certain landowner of our own day has also begun to wear the Russian costume in order to blend in with the people and to attend local meetings in it: as soon as they

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see him, they say to each other, 'Who is that mummer hanging around here?' So you see, that landowner has not blended in with the people." 53 The barin described here is incapable of being "Russian," even when wearing the correct costume. He can only attempt to perform the role of an authentic Russian, but the authentic narod are not fooled by the staged reproduction of their own identity. The description of the barin's inauthenticity poses a larger question in relation to Winter Notes: can the traveling narrator successfully locate the authentic if he himself is an inauthentic Russian-European? 54 The problem of authenticity interferes even with the genesis of the narrator's purported desire to travel. He claims he has wanted to travel abroad since childhood, when his parents read Radcliffe novels aloud on winter evenings. 55 The narrator recalls being stirred by the events described in the novels, and it is clear that as a child his "fevered dreams" of a Gothic Europe were confused with reality. Such expectations doom the narrator to disappointment as an adult. The early failure to distinguish between representation and reality calls the narrator's ability to observe accurately into question and suggests that he is ill-equipped to distinguish between the authentic and the false. Perhaps he is not entirely to blame for this; after all, Europe has been falsely represented to him, and by its own literature. The "inverted irony" of the narrator's stance toward his own expectations also suggests to what extent Europe fails to meet any ideal, perhaps especially that generated by childhood imaginings. 56 The Gothic imaginary is replaced with a bourgeois reality, and the fevered youth grows into an adult with motion sickness.57 In sum, Dostoevsky's Russian traveler is a disorderly one who has failed to observe the important border crossing out of Russia, missed his "first foreign impression," addressed the wrong subject matter for a travelogue, configured himself as the object of observation rather than as an observing subject, and who has demonstrated a failure to comprehend authentic Russian identity. This state of affairs provokes the question as to whether there is a border between Russia and Europe in this text.

"Elements of Barbarism Remain'' So far we have seen how borders, limits, and boundaries are transgressed or subverted in Dostoevsky's text. I will now turn to the demarcations that are made between Russia and the West in Winter Notes. There is a border (but an "improper" one) located in the cultural gap between the Europeanized Russian elite and the presumably authentically Russian narod. Elite Russians are perceived by the narrator as strangers within Russia: "The people now regard us as complete foreigners; they do not understand a single word, a single book, a single thought

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of ours .... "58 Mutual incomprehensibility between the elite and the masses is exemplified by the narrator's account of a recent newspaper story entitled "Elements of Barbarism Remain." 59 The piece describes the reporter's sighting of a drunken matchmaker publicly displaying certain of the bride's undergarments the morning after a wedding. The newspaper story treats the narod as the object of its gaze, as an ethnographic, even ethnic, phenomenon separate from the paper's implicitly elite readership; the elite report on their own people as foreign, exotic, and "barbaric," much as European colonizers might report on African or Indian "natives." The tide reveals an anxiety over the presence of "uncivilized" behavior in the same Russia inhabited by elite newspaper readers. The narrator, however, subversively champions the sight of the matchmaker by describing the horrified reaction of the imaginary journalist and his readers: "This is vile, this is unchaste, this is savage, this is Slavic."60 One might say, as the narrator suggests here, that the matchmaker's behavior is-if nothing else-authentic. There is nothing imitative or artificial about the display of the undergarments; it is an act that emphatically emphasizes notions of veracity and authentic experience. The border that could not be seen or experienced at Eidkuhnen reappears within Russia, between the inauthentic West and the "savagely" authentic Russian narod. The Russian elite, not fully European, yet not fully Russian, are European colonials in Russia, representatives of "civilization" among the "barbaric" natives. They are also Russian hangers-on in Europe, denizens of the imaginary place known as "Russian Europe," something perhaps not far removed from such colonial imaginings as Anglo-India, or the hybrid cultural "third space" formed in the margins between the colonizer and the colonized. 61 Too French to appreciate the Russian matchmaker, these Russian-Europeans are still too Russian to be invisible in France. 62 Where Karamzin had an intimate home circle and a fatherland to depart from and return to, Dostoevsky's traveler proves unable to depart or return from anywhere at all, in part because he is from a place that does not exist, "Russian Europe." He is left in the unsettling, homeless state of an eternal traveler, a foreigner at home and a stranger abroad. In Winter Notes, Dostoevsky's narrator emerges as the first Russian traveling writer of his kind-that is, as the first to exploit fully Karamzin's paradigm of "Russian travel" by writing a distinctly Russian travelogue, one that is disorderly and disruptive of the traditional "bourgeois" rules of the genre of order and predictability. He is also among the first to describe Russia as a European colony and Russian travel to Europe as a failure to depart from one place and arrive in another, as is signified by his inability to cross any sort of borders, a theme that will receive a closer look in relation to Herzen's work in Chapter 5. Permanently homeless, and on the road between Russia and the West, this constant traveler is doomed to a figuratively nomadic existence.

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As such, he is not entirely unrelated to his literary contemporary, Oblomov. As I will discuss in Chapter 4, the image that the narrator of Winter Notes presents to the reader echoes Chaadaev's concern with a stagnation born of rootlessness and lack of fixity, a concern embodied vividly in Goncharov's hero of homeless inertia. And yet in Winter Notes this image of the traveler is not an entirely negative one. He is still Russian in some sense, and as Dostoevsky argues in this essay, Russia has promise that Europe does not. The narod, at least, has a capacity for brotherhood and communality that sets it apart from the bourgeois individualism of Western Europe; this Slavic brotherliness will eventually redeem Europe. This link between the Russian character, disorderly as it is in Dostoevsky's telling, and tenets of Socialism will prove to be an important one, shared by Herzen, and developed in the early part of the twentieth century.

In Letters ofa Russian Traveler and Winter Notes, border crossing proves to be a rich chronotope that invites both the articulation of, and the confrontation between, self and other, Russia and Europe. Letters of a Russian Traveler is not only an early work of Russian travel literature, but it is also one of the earliest examples of modern Russian writing about identity and experience. It offers a cosmopolitan construction of Russian national identity in which Russia and Europe are not mutually exclusive cultural or geographical spaces. Border crossing is brought to the fore and experienced in detail, but, ultimately, departure, at least, is achieved. While travel may temporarily orphan Karamzin, the transition to such a state is proof of his ability to depart from Russia. His ability to come home, however, is more ambiguous. Home is comfortably enclosed within the borders of homeland, a boundary that is crossable, but not permeable. The model Karamzin's text establishes is not simply that of a Russian who can cross important borders, but rather that of a Russian who travels, who is defined, both as a writer and as a Russian elite subject, by travel itself. Travel has profound implications for the nature of Russian identity. An identity of change, movement, and mobility is an inherently complex and problematic one, and it is precisely these challenging extremes that Winter Notes exposes for its reader. The Russian border that was once crossable has become permeated by the mid-nineteenth century, such that passage between interior or home space and exterior or away space is no longer possible. Dostoevsky's stalled traveler has been caught in the act of passing between realms: Europe and Russia, the narod and the elite, the public and the private. Ultimately, Dostoevsky's Russian traveler is a traveler everywhere; permanently a stranger and visitor, and thus unable to actually travel between the differentiated spaces of home and away.

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Dostoevsky's nomadic Russian traveler is a response to the narrator of Karamzin's Letters, but he did not come into being overnight. He is the product of an extensive discourse of Russian nomadism, developed in the years between the publication of Letters of a Russian Traveler and Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. It is to this discourse of permanent motion and homeless rootlessness as expressed in key Russian philosophical and literary texts that I now turn, beginning with Chaadaev, the Russian thinker who was the first to explicitly articulate, in his philosophical writings and in his biographical persona, the idea of Russians as figuratively nomadic.

CHAPTER TWO

Chaadaev's Wayward Russia Capturing the Trace of an Errant History

In our houses we are like billeted guests; in our families we possess the look of strangers; in our cities we resemble nomads .... -Chaadaev The trace Chaadaev left on the consciousness of Russian society is so deep and indelible that the question involuntarily arises: was it not etched on glass by a diamond? -Mandel'shtam

Of

the Russian Romantics of the 1820s and 30s, Petr Iakovlevich Chaadaev (1794-1856) has frequently been described as the most ironic and paradoxical. 1 A philosopher, he published only one major work in his lifetime, and that, apparently, against his will. Publication of that work-the First Philosophical Letter (1829)-was so inflammatory that it earned him year-long house arrest and an official declaration of insanity. Letter was to have an immeasurable impact on Russian national consciousness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, asserting as it did the famously provocative view of Russia as isolated from the West and as lacking any positive identity, historical or otherwise. The position expounded upon in the Letter was based largely on Chaadaev's

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critical interpretation of the eleventh-century schism between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches and Russia's resulting exclusion from the historically unifying Catholic tradition of Western Europe. His Letter is widely credited with creating a divide of its own in the shape of the Slavophile-Westernizer debates that would preoccupy Russian society from the 1840s on. It is a commonplace of Chaadaev studies to assert that he was the first to pose the "question'' or problem of Russian identity in relation to the West. 2 As I will argue here, however, Chaadaev's Letter is extremely significant in another way, and that is for the powerful imagery that it crystallized in Russian national consciousness. Chaadaev's Letter explicitly articulates a discourse of uncertain identity in the symbolic terms of waywardness, nomadism, and errancy. Russian identity is envisioned in a metaphysical vein as rootless, homeless, and permanently, though fruitlessly, on the move. In this chapter I will examine Chaadaev's imagery of errancy in the First Philosophical Letter, viewing the text more in literary terms than as a religiousphilosophical treatise. 3 Chaadaev and his work lie at the center of a discourse in which nomadic wandering serves as a key metaphor for Russian national identity. As discussed in the Introduction, this discourse derives from both Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of history and civilization, ideas that will be discussed in greater detail in the first section of this chapter. I will also examine how Chaadaev's Romantic persona, as perceived by his contemporaries, reinforced the philosophical position regarding Russian identity elaborated in the Letter. The reception of Chaadaev in Russian society as a self-conscious emblem of Russian identity was widespread. While this was largely due to Chaadaev's deliberate persona and some of the salient facts of his biography, it was also partly formed by Pushkin's dedication of four early poems to his friend and by Herzen's treatment of Chaadaev in My Past and Thoughts. I will turn to these works in the second portion of the chapter. Before moving to Chaadaev's ideas and the text of the Philosophical Letter, I wish to address briefly the role of the writer-thinker in early nineteenthcentury Russia. The special place of the writer in Russian culture generally is well known, as is the elevated role of the writer, and especially the poet, in the Romantic movement more broadly across Europe. It bears noting, however, that the Romantic philosopher was likewise granted a special place in the Romantic Weltanschauung-like the poet, he was credited with powers of prophecy or vision. 4 There was no publicly sanctioned role for professional philosophers in Russia (a feature that distinguished Russia from, for example, Germany), but Chaadaev came closest to fulfilling the role in the first half of the nineteenth century. As is clear from his example, Chaadaev's unofficial position as philosopher-seer was a lofty one that placed him in direct confrontation with the highest authorities on more than one occasion. I have noted earlier that the

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Romantic emphasis on the self, and on the expression of individual identity, was in Russia inextricably bound up with the task of establishing national identity. In this way, the self-both as a literary creation and as a social-historical rolefulfilled a dual purpose as an embodiment of both individual and national identity. As lurii Lotman has shown, the political and the personal were closely interrelated in nineteenth-century Russian culture. 5 The persona (lichnost') of a figure such as Chaadaev, then, can be understood to represent a self-conscious articulation of what it meant to be Russian. How does Chaadaev configure Russia and Russians as figuratively nomadic? What are the origins of his characterization of Russia as an itinerant nation? How might Chaadaev's self-fashioning as a Romantic rebel serve to illustrate the vision of Russian identity that emerges in his work? These are the central questions of this chapter.

Contextualizing Chaadaev: Romantic Nationalism and the Nation of Nomads Chaadaev is critical to this discussion of Russian identity because he posited Russia as a nation astray, in contrast to its seemingly directed Western European counterparts. The topos of wandering had become a significant element ofliterary Romanticism in Russia by the early nineteenth century, most notably informing several of Pushkin's important works (the Southern poems, Onegi,n, andArzrum), as we will see in the next chapter. It was Chaadaev's Philosophical Letter, however, that explicitly developed the philosophical and historical connection between Russian identity and nomadic wandering. Chaadaev's characterization of Russia as culturally nomadic stems in part from Enlightenment thought concerning the progression of world/universal history and a hierarchy in which Western European culture represented the apex of civilization. 6 In such a setting, Russia was placed in the Oriental, "despotic" East-that is to say, outside the pale of civilization. As we have already seen, Romantic literature and philosophy placed a heavy emphasis on the idea of movement and especially on the act of becoming. The trope of the path ( Weg) was central to the contemporary conception of individual life as an infinite journey toward a more fully realized state of being. Like the Romantic individual, nations themselves were perceived to be engaged in a process of becoming, or of finding their own paths in a constantly evolving world history. 7 Such a thought was most fully developed in the Hegelian concept of world history, which emphasized the self-realization of individual nations at various points in a historical progression. In the English and German contexts, however, the notion of wandering served primarily as a marker of individual

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alienation from both nature and society. In Germany, where Romanticism was also deeply concerned with the idea of the nation, wandering was appropriated as a marker of "Germanness," but this trait was not applied in metaphoric terms to the idea of the nation as a whole. 8 It is only in the Russian context that the nation was conceived as appropriating characteristics of errancy, or distorted and alienated movement. The image of Russia as a nation astray, and the complex metaphor of the Russian nomad, emerge in Chaadaev's Philosophical Letter through the overlay of at times divergent philosophical constructions. The prevailing European Enlightenment view of world history, and of Eastern Europe and Russia specifically, suggested that Russians were primitive, wild, and "Eastern." 9 Such a view, arguably internalized by the narrator of the Philosophical Letter, informs the text's essentially Romantic positioning of Russians as a people existing in isolation from universal (European) history and progress. As Abrams shows in his influential study of Romantic philosophy, Romantic thinkers posited the existence of a universal consciousness, and theorized that isolation from this shared consciousness was dangerous, resulting in a failure to progress. 10 Two thinkers are of special relevance to this discussion of Chaadaev's Letter. the Ultramontane French Catholic writers Louis de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre, who both spent many years in Russia. Important influences on Chaadaev, their work is very much representative of the views described above, and a brief consideration of their thought serves to illuminate the context of Chaadaev's characterization of Russia as suspended or excluded from the progressive movement of European history. Both thinkers independently described Russia as nomadic. Writing in the early nineteenth century, these observers made use of a seemingly anthropological opposition between "civilized" and "uncivilized" parts of the globe. In this view, civilization was broadly equated with historical progress. More to the point, civilization was itself defined as the result of historical progress; history-or the development of meaningful events through time-was understood to occur only in "civilized," sedentary societies. Russia's perceived lack of civilization and history meant that it could be conceived in figurative terms as non-sedentary, or nomadic. De Maistre's views on Russia, expressed here in an 1810 letter, exemplify the reigning Western European perception of Russian ahistoricality and resultant exclusion from Western European civilization: "That species of moral growth which leads nations from barbarism to civilization has been suspended with you [Russians] and, so to speak, cut off by two great events: the schism in the tenth century and the Tatar invasion." 11 Variations of this argument repeat throughout de Maistre's work and are worth noting here for the striking similarities to Chaadaev's later formulations in the Philosophical Letter: "What a grand phenomenon Russia presents! This empire,

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placed between Europe and Asia, partakes of both .... The deplorable schism of the Greeks, and the invasion of the Tartars, prevented the Russians from participating in the great movement of European and legitimate civilization which radiated from Rome" (1975, 286). And in his Quatres chapitres inidits sur la Russie: "The original antipathy between Constantinople and Rome, the crimes and delirium of the [late] Roman empire, the inconceivable frenzy which seized the Occident in the tenth century [... ] the Tartar invasion [... ] the disastrous wall of separation erected definitively during the eleventh and twelfth centuries: all these causes, I say, were necessarily bound to remove Russia from the general movement of civilization[ ... ]." 12 Comments such as de Maistre's drew from the broadly held perspective, given voice in Kant's 1786 essay "Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History," that civilization was intrinsically connected to historical development. Enlightenment thinkers posited that history, here conceived in linear terms, began only with the advent of a sedentary, agrarian lifestyle. In this view, nomadic peoples necessarily existed outside of the procession of history, suggesting that a people perceived to lack geographical fixity also lacked a shared or collective historical narrative. If time was not experienced in delimited space, there could be no experience of temporal progression. This logic meant, then, that defined space-a homeland that granted an ethno-geographic identity to its inhabitants-was essential to that group's existence as a historical entity. In the Russian case, this logic would be reversed: perceived isolation from the collective European historical narrative would be interpreted to mean that Russians must be nomadic, that is, in figurative terms, not attached or fixed to any territory or homeland. They were not so much dislocated as metaphorically not located in either historical or territorial terms. As will be seen with Chaadaev and later with Pushkin, Russia's physical vastness and ever-expanding borders played into this strain of thought: the largeness of Russia was perceived as a kind of anti-space, or as a space so great as to exceed definition and thus to render its inhabitants unattached to it, and thus not attached to time-or as nomadic and homeless, though confined within its imperial borders. 13 In contrast to the Enlightenment's high valuation of reason, order, and man's triumph over nature, Romantic Naturphilosophie-deriving essentially from Rousseau's position that civilization represents not the highest achievement of humankind, but the loss of primitive innocence and harmony-contrived to find a way to return man to his original fusion with nature. In this mode, alienation was a fetishized state, its expression revealing a consciousness of the traumatic divide between man and his environment. Consciousnessthe very act of knowing-was itself at the root of what was perceived to be man's loss of an earlier harmony with nature. Awareness of this separation

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underlay the contemporary Romantic narrative of human consciousness as engaged in a journey in search of return to an original state of harmony. This retrieved harmony would at once restore and improve the original union of man and nature. This conception of individual consciousness merits attention here for its relevance to constructs of national consciousness. In German Romantic thought in particular, post-Kantian philosophers such as Fichte, Herder, Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel expanded upon the idea of the nation (or people) as a collective consciousness and an entity that was likewise striving not just to "become," but to recover its early character and to realize its unique properties within the scheme of universal history. In metaphorical terms, this process was envisioned in the form of a journey or national path (Weg) that each nation was meant to follow. The term Weg implied a circular journey, or one in which forward movement was also movement in return to the desired point of origin. 14 I elaborate on these issues here in order to contextualize both Chaadaev's evaluation of Russia as isolated from a seemingly universal or shared European history and his ensuing conception of its distorted national development. In the First Philosophical Letter, Chaadaev's Russians are on the move; but, in contrast to the classic Romantic trope of the journey, this movement is nondirectional, not linear or progressive, and, most importantly, not conceivable in terms of any sort of return since, as Chaadaev argues, there is no apparent point of origin for Russia to return to. Chaadaev's claim that Russia lacks any point of origin is a significant modification of the European Romantic idea of the lost point of origin. His Philosophical Letter stresses that Russia's isolation from European development is so complete that history has not yet begun for Russia. Therefore, there is no point at which one can identify a break with a harmonious, pre-historic past. Chaadaev's depiction of Russians as nomadic, or as permanent travelers who seem to lack points of departure or arrival (an image that will reappear in Goncharov's, Herzen's, and Dostoevsky's work), is, then, a complex synthesis and modification of various modes of thought concerning the nature of civilization, history, and national consciousness that were prominent in Europe at the time. It is important to stress that it is Chaadaev's Letter that brings together the broad Kantian and post-Kantian conceptions of world history with a specific perception of Russia as backward and as excluded from the progression of European history. Perhaps Chaadaev also meant to awaken national consciousness to its own alienation, the first step toward the realization of Russia as a nation. Arguably, Chaadaev might be said to have succeeded in this, since the Letter is so often credited with sparking the Slavophile-Westernizer debate and with posing the question of Russian identity in relation to the West.

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The First Philosophical Letter: Writing the Nation Astray The philosophical essay that would be published as the First Philosophical Letter was one of eight letters meant to elaborate a full description of the "problem" and the "answer" to the question of Russian identity. The cycle was written in French between the years 1828 and 1830, and the text of the First Letter was circulated in manuscript form in 1829. The other Letters were not published in Chaadaev's lifetime, though they did circulate; it was the first Letter that would give rise to intense debate in Russian society for decades to come. The format of the letter cum philosophical essay takes its place in a political epistolary tradition that stems from Voltaire's 1734 Lettres philosophiques, in which the French philosophe described the nature of the English nation. The Letter is presented as a personal missive to an acquaintance. This framing device is significant in formal terms because it suggests circulation and exchange, and as such it echoes the theme of movement, with which Chaadaev's treatise is concerned from its opening lines. The implied addressee is Ekaterina Panova, a young woman who had written to Chaadaev concerning her doubts about her Orthodox faith and who represents a generalized Russian audience. The narrator claims that she has been thrown into confusion (smiatenie) by the troublesome influence of the Russian social atmosphere (or "bad air") that literally "sets in motion" everything around her: "You have simply succumbed to the action of those forces which set everything with us in motion, beginning with the upper heights of society and ending with the slave [ ... ]." 15 Rather than attempting to appease his addressee's agitation, Chaadaev suggests instead that such a state is unavoidable-the partial awakening of her religious feelings, or rather, her emerging consciousness of the Russian environment in which she resideswill necessarily provoke such consternation. Awakening is itself unsettling, but it is greatly aggravated by the inherently confusing conditions of the Russian atmosphere, which, Chaadaev claims, have been set in motion by malevolent forces. The addressee's internal confusion appears to be caused by external disorder, suggesting that the relationship between the internal and the external, or between individual and collective, private and public spheres, is central to Chaadaev's text: You lack the very things which form the necessary framework of life elsewhere, where all the daily events are ordered so naturally, a condition as indispensable for a wholesome, moral existence as fresh air is for healthy, physical existence. You realize that I am not yet referring either to moral principles or to philosophical maxims but simply to a well-ordered life, to those habits and those patterns of the intellect, which provide leisure for the mind and impose a regular movement upon the soul. 16

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Chaadaev's characterization of Russian society as disorderly is one that pertains to all levels of national life, from the abstract to the concrete level of daily activity. Where writers such as Herzen and Dostoevsky would later take up the theme of Russian disorderliness in order to posit this anarchic state as an advantage over the stultification of the West, in Chaadaev's vision, lack of social order means that there is no fixity to national life. Disorderly Russian society cannot be rooted; it is necessarily in a state of motion. The lack of social stability or fixity is perhaps best captured by Chaadaev's famous image of Russian society in a state of utter flux: Look around you. Is anything really standing firmly? One could say that everything is in motion. No one has a defined sphere of activity, there are no good habits, there are no rules for anything, there is not even any domestic hearth; there is nothing that attaches you, nothing that awakens your sympathy or your love. There is nothing stable, nothing constant, everything flows, everything disappears without leaving any trace, either on the outside or the inside. In our houses we are like billeted guests; in our families we possess the look of strangers; in our cities we resemble nomads, grazing their flocks on our steppes[;] even they are more attached to their deserts than we are to our cities. 17

In Chaadaev's assessment, the entire Russian world is in motion. In the most explicit fashion, Russians are described as permanent travelers, or vagabonds, with all the negative implications of these terms. They are strangers in their homes. Unstable and isolated, they have no clear direction, no points of departure or return. Perhaps most importantly, they do not leave a trace of their passage in time or space, nor do they retain any trace of their experience: they are outside of history. As nomadic wanderers they traverse separate paths. Arguably, the Russia depicted here comprises an internal diaspora: rather than carrying a collective identity with them as they move away from a fixed homeland, these Russians move in isolation from each other and in a chaotic way, with no defined identity, and within a space that, though restrictive, can hardly be said to possess the features of a homeland. They have not been driven out of their homeland, but, rather, are troubled, perhaps unwittingly, by the lack of one and the absence of the psychological and emotional claims a homeland should place on their psyche. As the Letter stresses, inconstancy is seen to run deep in the Russian character: real nomads are more attached to their deserts than the metaphorically nomadic Russians are to their cities. Those urban spaces that should serve as focal points of national consciousness do not; they do not contain the history of the nation in microcosm since there is no history to contain. This profound Russian homelessness suggests a people who are out of place: they do not intrinsically

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belong to the world they inhabit (of families and cities), but instead "camp out" in all spheres, from the most intimate to the most general. On the verbal level, the sense of absence or a void is underscored by the insistent repetition of negative words: the eight lines of this passage contain no less than eight assertions oflack: no one, nothing, etc. It bears noting here that the first Russian translation of the Letter, as prepared for publication in the Telescope in 1836, explicitly identifies Russians as wanderers (stranniki) in this famous passage. In a slight, but telling, reinterpretation, Chaadaev's original statement "Regardez autour de vous. Tout le monde n'a-t-il pas un pied en l'air? On dirait tout le monde en voyage" 18 becomes in Russian: "Look around you. Everything is as if on the move [na khodu]. We are all as if wanderers." 19 Chaadaev complained of what he deemed the Letter's "weak translation" in an 1837 letter to his brother Mikhail, even placing blame for the uproar on the poor translation. 20 Yet the anonymous translator dearly understood the implication of Chaadaev's text and, perhaps even unconsciously, inserted the symbolically charged word "wanderer" into the Letter. Perhaps, as Chaadaev himself claimed, it was in part the bluntness of this translation that contributed to the outrage that followed the Letter's publication, even among those already familiar with its contents in French. Curiously, Chaadaev's description of Russian changeability and lack of attachment to people, places, and things bears a striking resemblance to de Maistre's assessment of Russian qualities in an 1815 letter: What you have that is good is evident. You are good, humane, hospitable, spiritual, brave, enterprising, happy imitators, not in the least pedantic, enemies of all fuss, preferring a pitched battle to drill practice, etc., etc. To this beautiful body two fistulas are attached which impoverish it: instability and infidelity. Everything changes in your country, my prince: laws are like ribbons, opinions are like waistcoats, systems ofall kinds are like fashions; you sell your house as you would a horse. There is nothing constant but inconstancy, and nothing is respected because nothing is old. 21

It also echoes de Bonald's identification of Russians as Scythians in his 1817 Pensees sur divers sujets: et discours politiques: "The Russians are still a nomadic people, at least by inclination, and the houses in Moscow are nothing but Scythian chariots from which the wheels have been removed. The Russians also have a singular penchant for changing the arrangement and furniture of their houses; one could say that, not allowed to move from one place to another, they change everything [else} that they can." 22 While scholars such as McNally downplay the influence of de Maistre and de Bonald on Chaadaev's religious thought, the French thinkers' literary influence can hardly be ignored. 23 Chaadaev's key

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image of a nomadic Russian bears a very close resemblance to de Maistre and de Bonald's nomadic vagabonds, Russians who change opinions like waistcoats and constantly rearrange the furniture. De Maistre's and de Bonald's metaphors are representative of the Western European, and especially French, view of Russia as primitive or not yet civilized: a people that lacks historical temporality must certainly lack constancy-they are not participating in progressive history. To be nomadic in this metaphorical understanding means to be unfixed, unstable, and incapable of constancy. Arguably, this is a view that the Letter's narrator has internalized and succeeds in reproducing-in French, the language of this opinion-for the Russian reader. Chaadaev's choice of language has important connotations, especially as it pertains to his critique of Russia. Like many members of the Russian elite, Chaadaev may well have been more comfortable writing in French than in Russian; certainly French was considered to have a more developed philosophical vocabulary. Aside from this, the language of the original suggests in literary terms that the Letter has been written by a thoroughly Gallicized Russian, one who has internalized not only the language, but also the dominant French view of Russia. He is incapable of viewing Russia in any way but through the eyes of a Western observer. The narrator of the Letter possesses no other linguistic or cultural framework for analyzing his own nation than that of the philosophes, a fact that suggests Russia's failure to create a philosophical context or language capable of articulating Russian nationhood. The very absence of such a philosophical framework lends credence to Chaadaev's larger argument that Russia itself hardly seems to exist in relation to the nations of the West. The language of the Letter also implies that Chaadaev was, at least in part, writing his critique of Russia for a non-Russian audience. Unlike contemporaries such as Pushkin, Chaadaev wrote work that could be published in the West and that directly addressed, or purported to share, widely held Western views of Russia and the East. A larger question arises from Chaadaev's text, however, and it is one that is difficult to answer: are readers meant to take this Gallicized narrator at face value, as expressing a truth about the Russian situation, or rather, is the narrator's tone an ironic recapitulation of typical European views, put on display for the critical reader? Alternately, does the narrator represent the kind of Russian who has internalized these views? Is the narrative perspective a device to spark the reader's awareness of these possible viewpoints? These provocative questions seem obvious, yet Chaadaev's Letter was not, and never has been, received as an ironic narrative. Its reception has been that of an earnest cri de coeur that was to have a lasting effect on Russian national consciousness. To return to de Bonald's characterization of Russians provided above, they are steppe-dwellers who only ape the forms of sedentary life: even if the wheels have been removed, their houses are still carriages, and even those Russians who live

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in cities cannot cease their eternal movement and internal changeability. In de Bonald's terms, superficial or external adaptation to sedentary life only increases Russians' internal nomadism: enforced stasis creates restless internal movement as Russians change everything that they can within the bounds that confine them. De Bonald's image of internally nomadic Russians recalls Pushkin's later implication in journey to Arzrum that restriction within Russia's borders leads to extensive personal, internal nomadic wandering within the confines of the Russian empire. The imposition of sedentariness-or of limitations on freedom of movement-fails to create the desired fixed and stable society in Russia, but instead produces its opposite: internal chaos, displacement, and a nomadic lack of attachment to place despite being confined to it. It also prefigures Chaadaev's depiction of an internal diaspora, or of Russians in search of an absent point of origin or homeland. In Chaadaev's Letter, the narrator describes a national isolation so extreme that no Russian possesses a domestic hearth, or private circle, where he can be at home. Individual homelessness derives from lack of national definition and isolation from Europe. Chaadaev argues that nothing has come of Russian attempts to join the directed Bow of European life: "[Russia's] participation in the general movement of the human spirit was confined to a blind, superficial, often awkward imitation of other nations." 24 Where the nations of Europe contribute to the development of history, Russia's uninterrupted state of "wild barbarism, rude superstition, and foreign rulers" places it outside this universal progression. Correspondingly, European historical time is understood to move in a prescribed fashion (i.e., nations develop, society improves, "progress" is made), while Russian time simply stands still. Russia has no temporality: it has no past and presumably no future; it exists in an eternal present of confusion and stagnation, a stagnation that is both caused by, and productive of, disorderly movement: "We live only in the most limited present without past and without future, amidst a Bat stagnation." 25 Stasis is here conceived, in a counterintuitive fashion, as an undirected state ofmotion, a form of permanent chaos that prevents Russia from moving along a path as the nations of the West are seen to do. The positive Romantic emphasis on the process of becoming is overturned in Chaadaev's depiction of Russia's stalled disorder. In the Letter, the lack of temporality, or Russia's limitation to a narrow eternal present, creates a form of social amnesia among the population. As Chaadaev maintains, Russians are "like foreigners to themselves" 26 : their lack of history means they do not share a common past and therefore do not recognize each other; it is as though they have never met before. Recurring imagery of both errancy and confusion (being mistaken) is underscored. This is particularly evident in the more recent Russian translations of the Letter (1991) by frequent

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manifestations of the word zabluzhdenie (error, delusion), which derives from the Russian verb bluzhdat', to wander or stray. Losing one's way is semantically related to error, to being mistaken or confused in French and Russian, as well as English. The double meaning of zabluzhdenie is stressed in the Russian translation: Russians' "best ideas" are paralyzed in their minds like "fruitless mistakes" (besplodnye zabluzhdeniia), and in the next line, the man who cannot connect with either a past or a future "feels he has lost his way in the world" ("on chuvstvuet sebia zabludivshimsia v mire").27 Errors and the errant state of being lost-or no longer on the right path-are mutually reinforcing, and the sound of error (or errancy) echoes in the passage. This echo is not present in the original French or earlier Russian translations, a fact that suggests that, whether deliberate or no, the most recent Russian translation places a particular emphasis on this underlying connection. 28 Chaadaev asserts that there are "confused (or lost) creatures" everywhere; yet in Russia, being confused is elevated to a general social condition: "Such confused (lost) creatures are met with in every country; with us this is a general property." 29 As before, mental confusion is expressed metaphorically as losing one's way, but here it is the nation that has "lost its way," both literally-an entire people has fallen out of a general progression-and figuratively-its very consciousness is confused. A society that consists of atomized, lost, and confused outsiders can hardly be called a society; an identity of errancy is, practically speaking, not an identity at all. Placed outside of time, and derailed from the progressive "path" of Western European history, Chaadaev's Russians are truly cultural nomads, not rooted conceptually to a homeland by history or society. The extent of the Russian absence of identity is further concretized in the image of Russians as physically void: "Even in our glances I find that there is something strangely vague, cold, uncertain, resembling somewhat the features of people placed at the lowest rung of the social ladder. In foreign lands, especially in the south, where physiognomies are so lively and so expressive, I often compared the faces of the inhabitants to those of my compatriots and I was struck by [this mureness] in ours." 30 Vagueness, coldness, and perhaps most significantly, silence are the characteristics that define Russians and set them apart from the spirited and expressive people of the South. Like peoples at the lowest levels of the social ladder, the people of the North have not attained speech; without it they cannot make an utterance or leave a trace of themselves. In his 1807 treatise on world history, Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel does not mention Russia or, indeed, Eastern Europe at all. It is tempting to consider the "silence" attributed to Russia in Hegel's schema as a precursor to the muteness that plagues Chaadaev's Russians. 31 It is also of note that Chaadaev's description of Russians' blank faces finds a striking parallel in contemporaries' description of Chaadaev's own face

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as mask-like, expressionless, and immobile. Chaadaev nominally opposes North and South in this passage, but it is clear from the rest of the text that this is more truly a comparison of East and West, an opposition which implies the familiar binaries of civilized/uncivilized, tame/wild, historical/ahistorical, settled/ unsettled, and, most strikingly of all, life/death. For Chaadaev, the people of other countries are animated, enlivened, and able to communicate, or, in other words, to act, while Russians lack life, spirit, and a voice-to the extent that Chaadaev signs the Letter not from Moscow, where he was living at the time, but from "Necropolis," the city of the dead. Characterized here as a land of the dead, Russia, stretched between East and West, with "one elbow on China" and another on Germany, is a burial ground, or no-man's-land, a "homeland" of wandering ghosts; or even, most troublingly, no place at all. Chaadaev's image of culturally nomadic Russians attached neither to place nor time, nor to each other, prefigures both Dostoevsky's portrayal of estranged Russians who are foreigners in their own country in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (discussed in Chapter 1) and Goncharov's Oblomov-like "eternal traveler," or Russian permanently displaced from an inaccessible home and homeland (discussed in Chapter 4). 32 While it was risky to mention Chaadaev in print in the nineteenth century, given his politically dangerous status, his image of Russians as nomadic travelers forms an important and previously unnoted source for the image of the russkii skitalets that Dostoevsky describes in the "Pushkin Speech." Notably, both Herzen and Dostoevsky would reverse Chaadaev's comparison of Russia to a land of the dead and instead link the West to death and Russia/the East to life. Worthy of brief note here is a contemporary example of the influence of Chaadaev's imagery. The Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz (17981855) was exiled to Saint Petersburg in the late 1820s and there befriended Pushkin. Their friendship suggests that Mickiewicz would have been aware of Chaadaev and the contents of the Philosophical Letter, if not directly familiar with them himsel£3 3 The poetic "Digression" to Mickiewicz's 1832 national drama "Forefather's Eve" (Dziady) details the exile journey of a young Polish rebel named Konrad to Saint Petersburg. While crossing a bleak and empty Russian landscape, Konrad encounters a people whose faces are blank, much like those described in Chaadaev's Letter, and upon whom time has left no trace and who have nothing to offer the world. 34 The similarity between Mickiewicz's and Chaadaev's views is striking, and suggests, at the very least, a shared perception in which Russians were assigned a "nomadic" lack of identity so powerful that it manifested itself as a national trait on both physiological and territorial levels. Mickiewicz would go on in the 1830s to develop a uniquely Polish variant of a national traveler in the figure of the Polish pilgrim. Like Chaadaev, Mickiewicz

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conceived of Poland as being in a state of movement, albeit a directed one in the form of a pilgrimage to restore the nation and redeem Europe.

As noted, Chaadaev's depiction of Russians as nomadic wanderers is informed by an Enlightenment construct of"civilization," to which the peoples ofWestern Europe were seen to belong-and to which other peoples, even those on the margins of Western Europe, de facto, did not-and, at the same time, by Romantic conceptions of the nation as an organic entity with its own special purpose within the larger framework of universal history. In Chaadaev's work these overlapping discourses of civilization and nationalism only serve to doubly exclude Russians from the historical realm of the West, for, as he claims in the Letter, Russia's only apparent "special purpose" is to provide Europe with a negative example, that of the failure to develop. The metaphor of the nomad, then, reflects, not just a "primitive" lack of history, but also an absence of culture and society, as well as, significantly, a lack of attachment to space. The "special purpose" of errancy negates the possibility of a homeland. As I argue, Russia's vastness-construed here also as a form of muteness-overwhelms time and history and is effectively so large that Russia fails to be a place at all. In a remarkable application of the Romantic paradigm of homelessness and longing, the Russians of Chaadaev's Letter suffer from a homeless and rootless condition, not so much because of their alienation from nature or a harmonious past, but, in a collective sense, because there is no national past or national space to adhere to. Where the early Romantic individual suffered from the malaise of existential homelessness, in Chaadaev's treatment, it is Russia itself that suffers from this illness, that pines for an absent homeland. Unlike the homesick traveler celebrated in German literature, the homeless Russian does not have a home to long for, or return to-even an imaginary one. Though this view would be modified in the other Letters and the Apology of a Madman (Apologie d'un Jou, 1837), the Romantic notion of rootlessness and the poetic motif of wandering in Chaadaev's Letter coincide with an Enlightenment anthropological discourse of civilization and its opposites, of the sedentary, rooted, historical life of Western Europe and the "barbaric" or nomadic lack of fixed community and identity that by nature was seen to define Europe's others. The Letter powerfully expresses this nomadic identity in all its confusion, errancy, muteness, vasrness, and lack of attachment to both domestic and national spaces. Perhaps it is not that Chaadaev is the first to pose the question of Russian identity so much as that he is the first to synthesize European thought about Russian identity and to take these ideas to a logical, if extreme, conclusion, one in which the ramifications of a figuratively nomadic identity are made clear.

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In accordance with a Romantic emphasis on the interrelated nature of text and behavior, elements of Chaadaev's biography and legendary persona reflect and even develop many of the ideas about Russian identity that are expressed in the Letter. In the following section I consider the way in which Chaadaev's highly legible persona was interpreted by his contemporaries as a statement about Russian identity, as well as how Chaadaev's behavior came to be seen as emblematic of Russian Romantic identity.

"In Athens a Pericles": Chaadaev as (Doomed) Actor on the Historical Stage The figure of Chaadaev is an important one in Russian cultural consciousness for many reasons, and not least for his role in introducing a Byronic behavioral code to the Russian public in the 1810s. 35 Early on, Chaadaev modeled his behavior after the English poet, a gesture that was both a socially provocative act and indicative of the performed behavior that would come to be associated with the Decembrists. 36 This gesture-recognized, if not always admired-by his contemporaries, contributed to the perception of Chaadaev as a "historical" figure, that is to say, as someone destined, or determined, to play an important historical role, even as Byron himself did, especially at the end of his life in the Greek war for independence in 1824. Pushkin's poems to Chaadaev from 1818-1824 (discussed later) are indicative of the perception of Chaadaev as deliberately acting for history. Chaadaev's legacy, however, is complex and has been interpreted in a variety of ways, ranging from Herzen's staunch depiction of Chaadaev as a proto-revolutionary to Gershenzon's early twentieth-century view of Chaadaev as an anti-revolutionary mystic. 37 Despite these conflicting (and, one might add, potentially equally valid) reactions to Chaadaev's work, his image left a lasting and underexplored imprint on Russian consciousness: he was arguably a source for such characters as Griboedov's Chatskii, Pushkin's Onegin, and Stepan Verkhovenskii in Dostoevsky's The Possessed (Besy), all figures highly pertinent to the literary expression of Russian national character. The critique of Russia that Chaadaev developed in the latter half of the 1820s, and the storm of controversy provoked by the 1836 publication of the Letter, assured Chaadaev a place in Russian cultural consciousness as a Romantic rebel whose fate came to illustrate that of the intellectual in Russia more generally. Chaadaev embodies a particularly Russian Romantic dilemma, one in which the fate of the self is intricately tied to the fate of the nation: if the individual cannot fully realize himself in society, then how can a nation as a whole hope to assert itself on a historical stage? And vice versa, if the nation has no historical place

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in the world, then how can its citizens hope to understand and realize themselves within its borders? This problem is enacted in Chaadaev's provocative gestures and in the complexities of his persona. His actions, countered by autocratic responses at every turn, demonstrated the validity of his central argument about Russia's social and political limitations. Further, his choice to remove himself from society for extended periods and to utter shocking claims about Russia's position in the world bespeak a Romantic code in which behavior served as an important means of articulating one's beliefs. Chaadaev's detachment from social and domestic spheres marks him as a nomadic figure or stalled traveler, much like the Russians he describes in the Letter. In general, the facts of Chaadaev's biography lend themselves to a Romantic interpretation, that is to say, to a narrative of difference, alienation, suffering, and prophetic vision. As biographers never fail to note, Chaadaev, born in 1794, was orphaned early on. 38 He was raised largely by his maternal aunt, and later by his uncle, Dmitrii Shcherbatov, an aristocrat who had attained notoriety for his opposition to Catherine's rise to power and who had been out of favor in her Court. In fact, Chaadaev inherited a legacy of aristocratic dissent to Russian autocracy: his grandfather, Prince M. M. Shcherbatov, was also well known for his opposition to Catherine and her followers, having written a critical description of her government, "On the Corruption of Morals in Russia." Never published, the manuscript circulated among members of the Russian elite and was generally known. 39 Chaadaev may well have viewed himself as continuing in a familial tradition of political critique in his own work. Early orphanhood and the legacy of political exclusion combined to shape Chaadaev's early biography in the Romantic mold of difference and alienation, similar to that of Pushkin's African ancestry and Herzen's illegitimacy. 4°Further, Chaadaev early on made the acquaintance of other reform-minded aristocrats at Moscow University, where he befriended the writer Alexander Griboedov and the future Decembrists Nikolai Turgenev, Nikita Muraviev, and Ivan Iakushkin in the early 1800s. The influence of Chaadaev's friendship on Pushkin, formed in Saint Petersburg when Pushkin was finishing at the Lycee and after Chaadaev had returned from the Napoleonic campaign, has been a favorite theme in literature about the Decembrist era. Chaadaev proved to be an important early mentor for Pushkin, as well as an inspiration for several early poems and arguably a source for Pushkin's own Romantic heroes in his Southern poems, Eugene Onegin, and journey to Arzrum.41 Chaadaev's relatively unremarkable youth was transformed in the early 1820s, when his career underwent a rapid change from a promising performance in government service to the acquisition of a reputation as a liberal provocateur. 42 In 1821 Chaadaev unexpectedly resigned from active military service, causing

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surprise among his contemporaries and prompting much speculation among them and future scholars. Prior to the resignation, Chaadaev had been entrusted with the task of delivering a report on the uprising in the Semenovskii regiment to Tsar Alexander I at Troppau. He had been told to expect a significant promotion for this service and was, in fact, in line to be promoted to aide-de-camp to the Tsar himself as a reward. Yet after the meeting with the Tsar, Chaadaev submitted a request for retirement, a move that both surprised and irritated his superiors. This action would have been unusual enough in itself, but the situation was soon compounded by a scandal concerning a letter Chaadaev sent about the matter to his aunt. The first of several "letters" that Chaadaev would stage as public statements, this private letter was, as a matter of course, opened by government censors. 43 The contents of the letter were serious enough to warrant the attention of the Tsar himself In it Chaadaev explained that his request for retirement was a deliberate provocation, meant to show his scorn for those who scorned others: "I found it more amusing to scorn this reward than to accept it. It amused me to show my scorn to people who scorn everyone [.... ] I prefer to amuse myself by witnessing the vexation of arrogant stupidity." 44 Given the bold tone of the letter, in which he referred to the expected promotion as nothing more than a "toy," it is hardly surprising that the Tsar indeed allowed Chaadaev to retire, but without the promised promotion. This episode, while not typically the kind of event that makes up conventional national history, has become central to the narrative of pre-Decembrist Russia and to the legend of Chaadaev, where it has been viewed as a gesture of political defiance. It has been interpreted in a number of ways: for example, the prerevolutionary scholar Gershenzon suggests that Chaadaev's action was meant to restore his reputation with the future Decembrists after an unacceptable display of personal ambition in his acceptance of the mission to Troppau. 45 Gershenzon notes that there was a pronounced atmosphere of patriotic selfsacrifice among the future Decembrists after their return from the Napoleonic campaigns (1815-1825) which could well have influenced Chaadaev. 46 Indeed, many of Chaadaev's contemporaries understood his provocative behavior in this affair as a deliberate act of self-sacrifice meant to increase his social standing in the Decembrist circles. Chaadaev himself refers to this interpretation in the same letter to his aunt: "Even now there are people who think that I secured this favor during my journey to Troppau and that I retired only in order to increase my standing." 47 Also persuasive, however, is Lotman's argument that Chaadaev's seemingly contradictory actions-first seeking out the task, then refusing the expected reward-were modeled on those of the Marquis of Posa in Schiller's popular 1783-1787 tale Don Carlos. The Marquis of Posa recognizes the tyrant Philip's loneliness and, in a show of complete disinterestedness (he refuses every

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award), offers to be the King's trusted friend. In exchange, he speaks openly to the King about the people's need for freedom. In Lotman's interpretation, Chaadaev accepted the mission to Troppau with the hope of speaking directly to the Tsar, in this case of the connection between the Semenovskii revolt and the wrongs of serfdom. According to the Posa model, Chaadaev would have to refuse any later reward or promotion so as to avoid any semblance of favoritism. 48 Certainly, the desire to speak directly with the tsar is consistent with a Romantic fascination with placing oneself on a level with higher power, as is the argument made here of self-conscious role-playing. 49 In addition, the facts of Chaadaev's cousin Ivan Shcherbatov's participation in the Semenovskii uprising, and Pushkin's very recent exile to the South, form an important background to Chaadaev's deliberately anti-authoritarian action, perhaps pushing Chaadaev to perform a rebellious act of his own equal to that of his contemporaries. At the very least, Chaadaev's behavior in this affair constituted a deliberate series of gestures and assumed a receptive audience among his peers; the experience also set Chaadaev apart from the crowd. While the motivations behind his resignation may have been complex, the received narrative of events is one in which Chaadaev dared to take a position against authority and to say so in writing. This created a special role for Chaadaev as a daring actor, as someone who existed outside or beyond the niceties of social convention and hierarchy, and who even manipulated these niceties for his own purposes. While this does not constitute a nomadic identity per se, it certainly reflects Romantic emphasis on the man apart, or the seer, and on the daring, yet futile, gesture. The means by which Chaadaev's actions in 1821 were carried out deserve special attention here. In what would become a repeated means of attaining the public's ear, Chaadaev made use of the genre of the private letter to publicly state his opinion and explain his otherwise potentially illegible actions. The tone of the discovered letter is unusual, both for a letter addressed to an elderly aunt, and in a letter from the front, which is subject to certain surveillance. The supposition naturally arises, then, that Chaadaev intended for this letter to cross the path of other, more politically important readers than his aunt. The content of his conversation with the Tsar at Troppau is not known, but a failure to achieve his aims in person might have prompted Chaadaev to use the letter as a means of addressing authority directly: the letter was ostensibly directed at his commander, but implicitly also at the Tsar himself Chaadaev's use of the letter to state private views on a politically sensitive subject draws from the contemporary genre of the "friendly letter," a literary form that served in Russian society as a platform for expressing political and philosophical views couched in terms of intimate correspondence. The friendly letter served a deeply important role as a vehicle for social debate, at least in part because more public genres such as the article,

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book, or pamphlet were not viable forms of political expression. The letter genre also reflected the elevation of friendship to a high level of cultural importance; this system stemmed from the Sentimental and Romantic emphasis on masculine friendship as the primary bond of one's emotional and rational life. 50 The matter of the letter extends beyond this, however. The scandal exposed the intrusion of the government into the private sphere, revealing the public, political consequence that resulted from expressing a private, individual opinion. On the other hand, the format of the letter also pointed to the very existence of personal opinion and its circulation, and made this fact explicit to the Tsar: state attempts to control personal beliefs were not effective. Further, Chaadaev also completed a writerly gesture that demonstrated the significance of texts themselves. The letter stood for Chaadaev and his views, and it succeeded in circulating and disseminating his views in a way he could not have achieved in person. The intercepted letter proved to be an effective means of broadcasting his views and of making a statement, as it were, unintentionally. Chaadaev's "honorable" dishonor at the hands of the Tsar exposed the difficulty of maintaining separate private and public roles in Russia and set a precedent for making use of the platform of the individual, private self to make a public critique. As if to complete the picture of symbolically meaningful behavior he engaged in at this time, Chaadaev sold his well-known library in 1821 and retired completely from society for two years. This seclusion functioned as a public gesture, for it served as a visible statement of disdain for life in active government service, as well as for Russian society more generally. It also suggested private unhappiness and Romantic eccentricity, and can be conceived of as a form of internal exile. This pronounced withdrawal ended only when Chaadaev left Russia for an extended sojourn in Western Europe from 1823 to 1826. Like others of his generation, Chaadaev had wanted to travel in Europe, and he had discussed the possibility of traveling together with Pushkin before the latter's exile to the South. 51 Chaadaev's journey was open-ended and was, in many respects, a continuation of the self-imposed banishment begun at home. Thus, the period from 1821-1826 saw Chaadaev's rejection of a promising career, withdrawal from society, and departure from Russia itself for an indefinite period, all moves that reflect in Romantic terms the image of a fateful wanderer who is dispossessed from both family and nation, home and homeland. One might note here that Chaadaev's extended departure from Russia bears something of a parallel to Byron's de facto exile from England in 1816 after the scandal in which he was dogged by rumors of incest and sodomy. Byron would travel to Switzerland and Italy, where he would become increasingly involved in national causes, including the Armenian, Italian, and Greek struggles for independence and self-determination.

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Chaadaev's travels meant that, like Pushkin, he was not present for the Decembrist uprising in 1825 and was thus excluded from the most important, and most rebellious, act of his generation. When he learned about the events in the spring of 1826 in Dresden, Chaadaev decided to return to Russia immediately, though return meant he would be subject to government restrictions due to his personal connections to many of the revolt's participants. Chaadaev's return to Russia serves as another visible enactment of a conflict between Russian authority and the Russian subject, for Chaadaev's return now meant the adoption of selfimposed exile from the West. His decision to return to Russia came at the most difficult moment for a liberal such as himself: he would not be allowed to leave Russia again for the foreseeable future and would fall under official suspicion due to his ties to the Decembrists. As Budgen suggests, Chaadaev was perhaps the first vozvrashchenets, or dissident who voluntarily returned to Russia to suffer the consequences. 52 These were immediate: Chaadaev's arrival in Warsaw was reported to the authorities and he was detained at the Russian border for forty days, where he was questioned and had his papers confiscated. He was kept under surveillance upon his return to Russia. Fittingly, Chaadaev entered into a second period of "voluntary seclusion'' immediately upon his return to Russia, this time for four years, from 1826-1831, until his doctor pushed him to return to society. During this period, he was no longer free to wander as he had in Western Europe, but he yet refused to participate in society and, in a sense, remained away. He was a solitary figure who did not belong to a social circle or family group. Reclusive behavior did run in Chaadaev's family-his older brother Mikhail left Moscow permanently to live on his estate, whither he was accompanied by his wife, the daughter of his valet-but Chaadaev's deliberate withdrawal from Russian society and from domestic life more generally should be read in terms of coded behavior, as an assertion of a solitary, rootless identity of exile and detachment that very much reflected the Russian identity he would describe in the Letter. During this second period of seclusion, primarily between 1828 and 1830, Chaadaev composed his cycle of eight Philosophical Letters. His work circulated in manuscript form, including the text of what would come to be known as the First Philosophical Letter. Despite the Letters' radical content, Chaadaev made sporadic attempts to find a publisher for them during the first half of the 1830s, but was unsuccessful. He gave the manuscript to Pushkin in 1831 in hopes that the latter would find a publisher in Saint Petersburg, and in 1832 he submitted portions of Letters VI and VII to a publishing house in Moscow, but publication was forbidden by ecclesiastical censors. In 183 5-1836 he tried again to have two of the letters published in the Moscow Observer and in 1836 sent a manuscript to Paris, but did not meet with any success. That same year, however, Nadezhdin,

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the editor of the struggling Russian journal Telescope, succeeded in obtaining the approval of the government censor and in publishing the most provocative of Chaadaev's letters, the first, in Russian translation. 53 There is some evidence to suggest that Chaadaev did not know of the Letter's forthcoming publication, suggesting that perhaps he would not have approved of the decision, despite his own four previous attempts to publish his work. 54 With its strident critique of Russian history and national character, publication of the Letter caused an immediate and sensational scandal; even Chaadaev's friends and political sympathizers-Pushkin, among others-were appalled by the public denunciation the Letter made of Russia. This was despite the fact that many of them were already acquainted with its contents. 55 While Chaadaev's views had been more or less acceptable as long as they remained in the private sphere of circulation among friends and acquaintances, and as long as they remained in French, the situation was radically changed once they appeared in print and in Russian, no longer the language of the foreign observer. Even those who disliked the repressive nature of Russian autocracy under Nicholas I were in agreement on this issue, suggesting that certain utterances were not permissible in the Russian public domain. For example, Viazemskii wrote to Chaadaev's friend A. I. Turgenev that he saw in Chaadaev's publication of the Letter only: "immeasurable self-love, an irritating thirst for theatrical effect, and a great deal of confusion, vacillation, and vagueness in its understanding." 56 Critics such as Viazemskii were validated in their reaction when Chaadaev was effectively silenced by the government. He was forbidden to publish in Russia ever again, confined to house arrest for one year, and officially declared insane by Tsar Nicholas I himself. 57 As when Chaadaev's earlier letter to his aunt made his views of Alexander I known to both the Tsar and the public in 1821, publication of the Philosophical Letter brought Chaadaev's views into the public eye in a most dramatic way. 58 Considering the harsh terms of Nicholas I's reign, however, such an event seemed destined to end in exile, expulsion, or worse. Here it is worth recalling the fate of Herzen, who was exiled to remote provinces for possession of incriminating personal letters two years earlier, or of Pushkin, who was exiled for five years after writing a politically sensitive poem in the 1820s. In contrast, Chaadaev's punishment for publication of the Letter verges on lenient; Chaadaev himself viewed the reaction as light. 59 An extreme punishment such as exile would have provided a fitting conclusion to the great Romantic gesture Chaadaev had initiated (wittingly or no) with the Letter's publication, and it would presumably have transformed Chaadaev into a heroic figure, suffering extreme hardship for uttering a critical opinion. Instead, the declaration of Chaadaev's insanity did much to diffese a situation in which, had Chaadaev suffered exile or worse, his

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punishment might have mobilized public sympathy. The assessment of madness was meant to undermine any validity Chaadaev's declaration of Russia's ills might have had, and it subverted the highly attractive Romantic idea of prophetic madness into a diagnosis of actual psychological illness. Scholars of Romantic theories of language have argued that the Romantic conception oflanguage prefigured twentieth-century speech-act theory in very significant ways. The period from 178 5-183 5 in Europe saw language-speech, utterance-conceptualized as an "action, energy, force, and creative power" that was capable of "positing the conditions for its own effectiveness."60 Thinkers and writers in the Romantic period viewed all forms of speech as action, and they perceived language as possessing an innate power to create reality. 61 This context helps to illuminate the power that the Letter's publication in a widely read journal had, both over Chaadaev's friends and sympathizers and over the authorities. As long as Chaadaev's views or utterances existed in the realm of private opinion or hearsay, their power was limited; they were a form of private resistance to public oppression. The legitimating act of publication, however, presupposed that the Letter was an authoritative text, one that in declaring a view of Russian reality came dangerously close not simply to reflecting that reality, but to creating that very reality, to making it the truth. This in part explains the reaction on the part of the Tsar and other authorities: their only recourse was to undermine the authority of Chaadaev's pronouncement, and they did so by taking immediate steps to recast the situation in terms of madness-or un-reality. The effect of the Letter was more pronounced in the Russian sphere, where opinions that differed from the official point of view were barred from the official sphere of publication. An opinion publicly stated was all the more powerful for the striking fact of its existence on the printed page: the surprising nature of its presence placed it on an equal footing with the official reality put forward in work approved by the censor. 62 A readership that did not contend with or confront a multiplicity of views, political and otherwise, on a regular basis in the authoritative sphere of print publication might be viewed as more susceptible to the power of an individual viewpoint when it did appear, regardless of content. One might theorize that such was the logic that unconsciously lay beneath both official reaction to the Letter's publication and the reaction on the part of Chaadaev's close contemporaries, who were already quite familiar with the Letter's contents. 63 The outcry around the Letter's publication drowned out any potentially ironic interpretation of its substance. Though he was never permitted to publish again, Chaadaev did write Apology ofa Madman in 1837, a piece that also enjoyed a wide private circulation, and that articulated more fully Chaadaev's philosophical thought concerning Russia.

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Here he modified his position in the first Letter by asserting that Russia's lack of a past meant it had the potential to learn from the West and to develop a future in which it might well surpass the West. This perspective would later be developed by Herzen and Dostoevsky, among others, and would take on an increasingly radical turn, not present in Chaadaev's original essay. At the time of its appearance, the Apology was widely viewed as a response to the social outcry against the Letter and the threat of further government reaction, rather than as a logical conclusion of Chaadaev's earlier claims. 64 The conclusions reached in the Apology are embryonically apparent even in the Letter, however, and it is clear from the remaining Letters-material not available to readers and scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-that the Apology is a summation of these ideas. The by now familiar formula in which the concept of Russia's "backwardness" and difference from the West are transformed into positive national attributes was first made known to Russian readers in the Apology. Chaadaev, however, was never able to make these views public in any official way. Rather, he remained in public memory as the man who produced a shocking denunciation of Russia, and who set himself above or apart from his contemporaries in order to make this assessment. It bears noting that the scandal surrounding the publication of Chaadaev's Letter is comparable in Russian letters to another significant political literary event, the affair surrounding the 1790 publication of Alexander Radishchev's Journey from Saint Petersburg to Moscow. The two writers are not generally linked, but their fates are similar. Radishchev's internal travelogue was a strikingly harsh critique of Russian society that bemoaned serfdom, censorship, and autocracy, among other things. Like Chaadaev's Letter,journey came to the Russian reading public in an unusual way and provoked an intense and severe reaction on the part of the authorities, Catherine II in particular. In Radishchev's case, he was directly responsible for an act of subterfuge when he published the complete text of journey on his home printing press without removing the large sections of the book that the censors had deemed unprintable. When the deceit was discovered, Radishchev was arrested, held in the Peter and Paul fortress for nearly a month, and condemned to death. This harsh sentence was commuted ten days later to ten years of exile in Siberia, coupled with the loss of Radishchev's gentry status, rank in service, and knighthood. 65 In 1802, six years after his return from Siberian exile, Radishchev committed suicide as a result-or in protest-of his frustration with the glacial pace of Alexander I's judicial reforms (Radishchev served on the commission responsible). Arguably the first political suicide in Russia, Radishchev's action would resonate even into the twentieth century in such incidents as Mayakovsky's death at his own hand, interpreted by many as a gesture of resistance to the encroaching

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totalitarianism of Soviet society. The appearance of Chaadaev's Letter and the reaction to it certainly recalled Radishchev's fate, even if it was risky to draw this parallel publicly. It is tempting to consider that Chaadaev may have to some degree deliberately modeled his behavior on Radishchev's example in seeking publication of the Letter and in enduring the post-publication scandal and punishment. There are other important parallels between journey and the First Philosophical Letter, both in terms of the content of the two works and in terms of the reaction they provoked. Journey had been brought to Catherine's immediate attention, just as the Letter was brought to the attention of Nicholas I. Catherine read the text closely and left several pages of comments in response to what she saw as Radishchev's seditious text. Like Nicholas I's response to the Letter, her comments were meant, at least in part, to undermine the power of Radishchev's critique of Russia. She comments at much greater length than Nicholas, but in the same terms, noting in the first paragraph that the author of]ourney is "infected and full of the French madness." 66 She notes that the book, like the author's mentality, is "unbridled" and that Radishchev is a gloomy hypochondriac who engages in "arbitrary, quasi-philosophical raving." 67 In other words, Catherine implies that journey is a book written by someone in a disordered state, a madman. As Nicholas would state explicitly forty-six years later, only a lunatic could write so critically of Russia. Borrowing from the Western European genre of the internal travelogue, the Sentimental narrator of Radischchev's text is appalled by the vagaries of serfdom and other forms of social violence and poverty that he encounters on the road between Russia's two capitals. In no uncertain terms, the narrator depicts the ubiquitous presence of petty social ills such as bribery, court corruption, and legal obfuscation as well as the terrifying extent of physical and sexual violence inherent in a society that permits slavery. The implication that Russia lags behind the West in social and political terms is present on every page. In an uncanny precursor to Chaadaev's later behavior, Radishchev's narrator at one point imagines himself in the position of a tsar who is confronted by a simple female pilgrim. She claims to speak the truth and to have come to reveal to the sovereign the error of his ways. She removes the veil from his eyes and shows him the weakness and arbitrariness of his rule. Such a scene enacts, on the page at least, a direct conversation between the author of Journey and that most important reader, the ruler, or Catherine herself. It also suggests a plot not dissimilar to that of Don Carlos: a disinterested friend comes to the ruler to offer constructive criticism; the good ruler is one who can listen to this neutral observer and take the valid points of the critique to heart. In the Russian case, however, reality proved to be quite different. Neither Catherine nor her grandsons Alexander and Nicholas perceived the "disinterested

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criticism" offered by Radishchev or Chaadaev as anything but the most radical sedition, demanding punishment and suppression. In addition to explicating the wrongs of Russian society, Radishchev hints in passing at the problematic nature of Russia's size, an important theme for Chaadaev as well. As Radishchev explains in a brief summary of a portion of his poem "Liberty: An Ode": "the future fate of our country'' is such that it will "fall into separate parts-all the sooner, the greater it grows." 68 The text suggests here that imperial expansion is less a boon for Russia than it is a source of diffusion: as Russia expands, its control over its vast territories will be weakened and the state will cease to exist. 69 The vastness of the Russian empire makes the coherence of a distinct Russian state impossible; as Tolz has noted, the fundamental confusion between Russia's imperial and· national identities had important ramifications: there was no core national identity distinct from that of the empire, yet the empire was not clearly defined either. 70 Finally, it bears noting that Radishchev chose to frame his bold critique of Russia in the form of a travelogue. This genre is a convenient means of portraying a cross-section of a society, but in the Russian context it comes to carry additional meaning. journey appeared almost simultaneously with Karamzin's 1791-1792 Letters of a Russian Traveler, a fact that possesses enormous significance: the combined appearance of these works, both instrumental in their own way for positing the existence of Russia as a discrete national entity (as compared to the West) and for addressing the question of Russian identity, perhaps inadvertently added a dimension to that identity itself. Not only were travel and travel writing established as an institution for viewing Russia and Russian identity, whether explicitly or implicitly, but the fact of these travelogues suggested that Russian identity could only be known through travel, that it was itself predicated on travel. By prominently vocalizing the question of the nature of Russian identity, especially in relation to Europe, through travelogues, these narratives guaranteed that this identity would become inseparable from the idea of travel itself. As this book demonstrates, this entanglement would have profound ramifications in Russian consciousness. Radishchev forms an important parallel for Chaadaev. Like Radishchev, Chaadaev also used his social position to perform a grand gesture of declaration, stating radical views and publishing them for all to read. This gesture was, on Chaadaev's part, a form of career or public suicide. Dismissed alternately as insane or fame-seeking, both men would find themselves silenced in the public sphere and removed from public discussion (as was Herzen years later): bold steps provoked oppressive punishment. After the appearance of Radishchev's journey, no such scathing critique would be published agairi in Russia for nearly fifty years, but when it was, the affair played out along remarkably similar lines.

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A daring aristocrat sacrificed his social and political career for the sake of stating his views, both to the Russian readership at large and to the highest authority in the land. While neither text succeeded in inciting the change their authors hoped for, both became landmarks of Russian thought and indelible historical events in and of themselves. These works succeeded in capturing-and even in creating-the trace of Russian history. Chaadaev's carefully constructed and well-known biography was punctuated by a series of provocative incidents: his "honorable" dishonorable retirement from the army, his decision to return to Russia after the Decembrist uprising, two extended periods of voluntary seclusion from society, and, finally, the succes de scandale of the First Philosophical Letter. The Letter, constituted as a rebellious act, placed Chaadaev on a level with that of his peers, the Decembrists, in terms of outspoken resistance to the autocratic status quo, even if a decade had passed since the Decembrist uprising. Further, official reaction to the Letter exposed the way in which individual thought, opinion, and public utterance had been made impossible in Russia. In the same vein, however, the appearance of the Letter in print put Chaadaev in direct dialogue with Russia's reading public and with the ultimate authority of the tsar. As Herzen would later write, the very existence of Chaadaev's bold thought placed him in "direct opposition to the Most High." 71 The Tsar's handwritten comments on official reports on Chaadaev's Letter does in fact establish a dialogue between Chaadaev and the man who was clearly meant to be his principal addressee. The key moments in Chaadaev's biography elevate speech and writing-or utterance-to the level of daring political action. Such an emphasis on the bold nature of the speech act was in keeping with Romantic philosophy generally, and the privileged role of the poet and philosopher within it. 72 The figure ofChaadaev demonstrates an important tension between the public and private in Russia, where there was no place for a legitimate private sphere that could coexist with the public realm. The private sphere as a realm of intimacy did exist, but it did not constitute what historians of Western Europe describe as a publicly-or legallysanctioned private sphere where dissension could occur. Chaadaev's use of the private form of the letter serves to reveal the absence of the "private individual" in Russia, quite in contrast to the highly developed publicly approved private realm in the West. Given Chaadaev's philosophical emphasis on community, the sanctity of the traditional social order, and the necessity of subsuming the self into a larger unity, 73 the extent to which the events of his biography are concerned with the limits placed on the individual self in Russia seems paradoxical, to use the word so often ascribed to him. His refusal to take part in the everyday realm of society and family, and his dramatic gestures and prophetic statements, however, made Chaadaev emblematic of a Russian Romantic identity of rootlessness and

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homelessness that so strikingly complemented his articulation of a metaphorically nomadic Russian national character.

The Legend of Chaadaev Chaadaev behaved in an eccentric way at several points in his life, removing himself from society and setting himself in direct conflict with the Tsar. His behavior was directed at an audience of his peers, who were well able to "read" his actions. As I will show in this section, their reception of Chaadaev helped to create a lasting and influential legend of a mad prophet. Numerous accounts remark upon Chaadaev's distinctive and theatrical social mannerisms, and in particular his unorthodox speaking style, which more often than not conveyed to his audience the sense that he was "touched." As A. V. Iakushkina (wife of the exiled Decembrist) commented in an 1827 letter to her husband: "But if you were to see [Chaadaev], you would find him very strange. He continually becomes expressionless, draws himself up, does not listen to what is being said to him, and then, as if inspired, begins to speak." 74 The quote from Viazemskii concerning Chaadaev's "immeasurable self-love" demonstrates that many of his friends and contemporaries saw the publication of the Letter as a deliberate and fame-seeking act, implying that Chaadaev was performing scripted behavior rather than acting genuinely. The fact that Chaadaev never married or seemed to engage in any romantic relationships has also been interpreted as a deliberate means of distancing himself from domestic as well as broader social circles. 75 His lack of a personal domestic center mirrors the absent "domestic hearth" he ascribed to Russians in the Letter. Curiously, this image of the absent hearth would also resonate deeply in Russian culture and thought, perhaps most notably in Goncharov's Oblomov. Memoirs of Chaadaev's contemporaries attest to the "legibility" of his cultivated persona, and to the social reception of him as a proud and disdainful Romantic intellectual. In a Byronic vein, he was concerned with genealogy and pedigree and was considered a dandy with an aristocratic and cold manner. 76 In short, contemporaries read "Chaadaev" as an image with a message, and understood him to consciously stage his actions and manners in the style of an isolated, prophetic recluse. Typical descriptions of Chaadaev include note of his unique bearing and masklike face, emotionless yet tinged with suffering. In essence, he was perceived to be a thoroughly Romantic hero, complete with conflicting external and internal emotional tendencies, as Gershenzon's composite description reveals: "In his appearance there was a kind of sharp originality that immediately distinguished him, even in a large company. His face was similarly original, tender, pale, as if

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made of marble [... ]with an ironic and, at the same time, kind smile[ ... ] [and] with a cold gaze from his grey-blue eyes. In the immobility of his delicate features there was something deathly, that spoke of burned-out passions and of a long habit of hiding the fiery agitation of his soul from the crowd." 77 In My Past and Thoughts, a work that strongly contributed to Chaadaev's lasting reputation in Russian culture and which will be discussed in Chapter 5, Herzen also comments on Chaadaev's distinctively "melancholy and original figure," his motionless features, the mixture of kindness and irony in his gaze, and the passion concealed under his icy exterior: "Old and young alike were awkward and ill at ease with him; they, God knows why, were abashed by his immobile face, his direct glance, his gloomy mockery, his malignant condescension."78 I note the social construction of Chaadaev's Romantic mask here because it offers a half-revealed private self: "Chaadaev" is unknowable, but at the same time his public persona serves as a constant referent to private depths within. Behavioral posturing was not unique to Chaadaev, of course; it was a pronounced phenomenon in Russian liberal circles and stemmed from a shared Romantic concern with acting on the stage of history. Chaadaev was unique, however, in his use of all aspects of the self as a political statement. As Mandel'shtam would retrospectively comment on Chaadaev's behavior: "as if aware that his persona did not belong to him, but was rather meant for posterity, he treated it with a certain humility: whatever he did, it seemed as though he was serving or conducting a rite." 79 Chaadaev's stylization of behavior took on other forms as well. He and his contemporaries referred to members of their circle by symbolically important names, thus assigning individuals larger social and historical meaning. Chaadaev referred to his close friend A. I. Turgenev as Ahasuerus, the name associated with the figure of the Wandering Jew. As we saw in the Introduction, this symbol possessed deep significance in the Romantic context, especially as an expression of the duration of history and the passage of time itself. Importantly, Chaadaev assigned this name to the friend whom he viewed as a double for himself, suggesting strongly that Chaadaev himself identified with the figure of Ahasuerus. 80 In particular, Chaadaev's use of this name fits with his pose as society's prophetic outcast, doomed to eternal wandering, a personal variation of the nomadism articulated in the Letter. Chaadaev's seclusion and ability to hold himself aloof from the crowd, his lack of domestic attachments and even of domestic arrangements (he did not live in his own house, but resided in the wing of a friend's house in Moscow8 1), all conspired to create an image of a man apart-not physically a wanderer, but in many other ways maintaining a detached and unrooted stance in relation to society that reflected the position of a wandering prophet-outcast, such as Ahasuerus.

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"To Chaadaev": The Legend of Chaadaev in Pushkin's Poetry and Herzen's My Past and Thoughts The perception of Chaadaev as playing a key historical role in Russian society is not limited to social reaction. Between 1818 and 1824 Pushkin dedicated four short poems to his friend and mentor, three of which were entitled "To Chaadaev" ("K Chaadaevu," 1818, 1821, 1824) and the other of which was entitled "To Chaadaev's Portrait" ("K portretu Chaadaeva'') from 1819. 82 Pushkin's Chaadaev poems did much to establish the image of Chaadaev as a doomed historical actor, prevented from achieving the significant political or social impact he might have been able to in another time and place. While attention has been given to the friendship between Pushkin and Chaadaev, little scholarly work has been dedicated specifically to the topic of the poetic epistles. I will consider them briefly here as important components of the Chaadaev myth, as well as manifestations of Pushkin's response to Chaadaev and his views of history. Pushkin's poems both establish and help to perpetuate an idea of Chaadaev's persona as an embodiment of the problems of Russian identity and history; at the same time, the poems serve to inscribe both Pushkin and Chaadaev into a specifically Russian historical legacy. Written before Pushkin's exile, "K Chaadaevu" (1818), the first of the four poems dedicated to Chaadaev, is openly anti-autocratic. The verse maintains that autocracy will be defeated and that freedom will come to Russia. When it does, the poet asserts: "They will write our names/ on the fragments of autocracy." 83 Here the poet claims an exclusive role for himself and Chaadaev as the destroyers of tyranny. This hubristic move will prove to be doubly ironic: Chaadaev and Pushkin will later be the most prominent non-participants in the Decembrist Revolt and the destruction of Russian tyranny will prove to require much more than the combined forces of a philosopher and a poet. Importantly, however, the speaker has confidence in the significance of "Pushkin" and "Chaadaev" for the Russian national historical narrative. This confidence fades in the later poems. Just a year later, Pushkin formulates the famous epigram concerning Chaadaev's frustrated political ambition and inability to engender a fitting role for himself on the historical stage in the 1819 "To Chaadaev's Portrait": "In Rome he would have been a Brutus, in Athens a Pericles. / But here he is-an officer of the Hussars." 84 The flat banality of this military role contrasts starkly with the two heroic roles from classical Greek and Roman history. In these brief lines, Russia is construed as a place where talent and significance cannot be deployed to their fullest extent; the range of historical possibility is severely restricted. The poem, however, implicitly critiques an autocratic state in which great deeds cannot occur. Further, the absence of momentous events

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and great figures presages, as we have seen, Chaadaev's own later depiction of Russia's lack of history. In Pushkin's Russian context, even those individuals with the stuff of greatness cannot act in a memorable and meaningful way: there can be no Pericles, the famed Athenian leader who extended suffrage, or Brutus, conspirator against a tyrant, as there is simply no place for events and personages of historical significance. Potential lurks within the poem: Chaadaev could have been this kind of figure, but the limitations of the Russian environment prevent this potential from being realized-an officer of the Hussars will not succeed in leaving a deep historical mark; Russia will not possess the world significance of ancient Rome (despite its frequent identification as the "third Rome"). The concern with the failure to leave a historical mark or trace in "To Chaadaev's Portrait" appears again in the fourth poem, "To Chaadaev" (1824). This poem is set in the Crimea, and two pasts overlap: that of ancient Greece, the legacy of which remains on the Crimean peninsula, and, in the second verse, the more recent recollected past of Chaadaev and Pushkin's friendship before Pushkin's exile and Chaadaev's departure for Europe in the early 1820s. The poet standing at the ruins of the ancient Greek Temple of Diana at Tauride draws an explicit connection between the "sacred friendship" enshrined in the myth of Orestes and Pylades, connected to these ruins in Greek myth, and his relationship with his friend and mentor Chaadaev. In doing so, Pushkin historicizes and elevates their friendship, while simultaneously making reference to the ancient story of Orestes's revenge for the murder of his father, Agamemnon. Agamemnon's death serves as an oblique reference to the murder of Alexander I's father, Paul (and as a veiled threat to Alexander) and reminds the reader ofOrestes's subsequent years of wandering with Pylades. The poet also asserts that Russia-like the Westcan claim possession of the classical legacy. The poem opens with the question "Why these cold doubts?" and a statement of the poet's faith in the ancient Greek ruins of the Temple of Diana at Tauride: "I believe-here there was a formidable temple / Where smoked the blood of sacrifices / To the thirsting gods." 85 These doubts have been presumed to refer to the whereabouts of the Temple's original location, 86 but it is possible to understand the opening question and assertion of faith in a broader sense. The question is addressed to Chaadaev, the stated addressee of the poem, and it is to Chaadaev that the poet insists upon his faith, not simply in the Temple's location, but seemingly also in the very existence of the ancient past that legend and the ruins represent. The poem creates a historical link between the classical past that transpired on what is now Russian soil and the Russian present. Chaadaev's implied skepticism as to the Temple's original location is similarly suggestive: he appears to doubt the link to the mythological past that this site represents (in other words, he doubts Russia's claim to this patrimony).

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The context of Orestes's and Pylades's destruction of a tyrant recalls Pushkin's claim in the first of the four poems ("To Chaadaev," 1818) that Pushkin and Chaadaev will destroy Russian tyranny, leaving their names etched on the broken fragments of autocracy. Now, however, faced with the ruins of the Temple of Diana, Pushkin recalls that he once thought to inscribe a "fateful name" on different ruins: "Long ago with youthful rapture/ I dreamt of the fateful name/ [that I would] consign to other ruins[ .... ]" 87 In a gesture that at once historicizes and diminishes the grandeur of his previous claims, the poet now actually inscribes his name and Chaadaev's ("/ write") on the ancient stone of Tauris. This is a popular act of leaving tourist graffiti, but it is one with many layers of meaning: rather than prophesying that Pushkin's and Chaadaev's names will be written (" they will write") on the ruins of autocracy, as in the 1818 poem, the poet takes matters into his own hands and now inscribes their names himself-on the ruins of ancient Greece, the origins of the civilized world: "And, in inspired tenderness, / On the stone sanctified by friendship, / I write our names." 88 "I write" (pishu) reverses the earlier line "they will write" (napishut) in a number of ways: the inscription happens in the present, not at an unnamed moment of future glory, and it is done by the poet's own hand, not by the fateful "they" presumed to be the recorders of historical narrative: the poet is the historian, and he historicizes himself. In an added ironic twist, Pushkin inscribes his and Chaadaev's names not on the ruins of autocracy, but on the symbols of that autocracy's imperial triumph-the ruins of the ancient Greek classical past that have recently been acquired by the Russian empire and are a "jewel in the crown" of Russian autocratic history. Chaadaev's and Pushkin's names have been linked to the elevated friendship and classical past of Orestes and Pylades in the poem, but they have now also been tied firmly to the Russian historical present. In this present, the Russian empire has expanded to encompass former sites of classical fame and thus has acquired a link to the classical legacy of Western Europe, or to that very past to which, Chaadaev will argue, Russia lacks a connection. I would comment briefly that there is a second important theme in this last poem. Pushkin wrote the 1824 "To Chaadaev" at Mikhailovskoe during the latter part of his exile. The verses are written as if from the Crimea, however, where Pushkin had recently been, and they were written while Chaadaev was traveling abroad in Europe on a journey the two men had meant to make together. Given the background of their foiled travel plans, the "other ruins" Pushkin once hoped to write their names on might also refer to the historical monuments of Europe they would have visited together. The reference to Orestes and Pylades is also poignant in this regard, since Pushkin and Chaadaev, though fated to lead individually nomadic lives, were prevented from wandering together. As their friendship is stretched by a widening gap of time and space, Pushkin's inscription of the two

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men's names together is given special urgency by their parallel itinerancy. Where Pushkin's poems help to create the myth of Chaadaev as a great personage frustrated by the lack of historical possibility in Russia, the Russian writer and thinker Alexander Herzen paints a different portrait of Chaadaev and his role in the Russian literary-cultural context. Herzen was deeply concerned with Chaadaev and the questions posed in the First Philosophical Letter. As will be discussed in Chapter 5, the extent of his engagement with Chaadaev is profound; scholars such as Tolz argue that Herzen's concept of Russian Socialism was designed in answer to Chaadaev's troublesome questions. 89 Like Pushkin, Herzen understands Chaadaev in Romantic terms, but he explicitly identifies Chaadaev less as a stymied historical figure than as a successful historical actor, albeit in a restricted context. This interpretation meshes with Herzen's own views on Russian reality under Nicholas I. He identifies the most significant feature of Chaadaev's legacy, in true Romantic fashion, as the power of his utterances: "For ten years he stood with folded arms [... ] an embodied veto, a living protest 90 [ ••• ] ." The theme of Chaadaev as a speaker who is bold in both word and gesture is one that Herzen returns to frequently, perhaps most notably when he refers to, the publication of the First Philosophical Letter in 1836 as "a shot that rang out in the dark night." 91 Herzen construes utterance-in this instance, giving voice to the unsanctioned-as the only achievable, and therefore most significant, action in the repressive atmosphere of silence that existed in Nicholaevan Russia. The very "sound" (or shock) of the Letter exposed for Herzen the deafening lack of genuine speech in the public sphere. This absence is demonstrated in an exchange between Herzen, Belinsky, and an unnamed Slavophile in My Past and Thoughts: [The Slavophile] ... suddenly began talking of Tchaadayev's famous letter and concluded his commonplace remarks [... ] with the following words: 'Be that as it may, I consider his action contemptible and revolting;. I have no respect for such a man.' [... ] I thought it was unseemly to let this absurd remark pass. I asked him dryly whether he supposed that Tchaadayev had written his letter disingenuously or from interested motives. 'Not at all,' answered the gentleman. An unpleasant conversation followed; I mentioned that the epithets 'revolting and contemptibl.e' were

themselves revolting and contemptible when applied to a man who had boldly expressed his opinion and had suffered for it [... ] All at once, Byelinsky cut short my words, he [ ... ] came up to me as white as a sheet and [ ... ] said [ ... ]: 'We are strangely sensitive: men are flogged and we don't resent it, sent to Siberia and we don't resent it, but here T chaadayev, you see, has picked holes in the national honour, he mustn't dare to speak; to talk is impudence, a flunkey must never speak! Why is it that in more civilised countries where one would expect national susceptibilities to be more developed than in Kostroma and Kaluga words are not resented?' 92

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The topic of Chaadaev has provoked Herzen, Belinsky, and the Slavophile to impassioned speech acts of their own. Even Herzen's Slavophile interlocutor, presumably offended by Chaadaev's negative assessment of Russia, seems less concerned with the content of Chaadaev's Letter than he is with the fact of its appearance. Once again, it is the public statement of private opinion that is problematic, not so much the opinion itself, as harsh as it is. As Lotman notes about the period, "the word publicly spoken" was itself an act. 93 Publication of the Letter in the Telescope is, perhaps, at the very essence of Chaadaev's project, whether he intended for it to appear publicly or not, for, as he argues repeatedly in the text of the Letter, the success of the West is based on the existence of convictions (ubezhdeniia), that is, on personal beliefs and opinions that may be publicly expressed: "The entire history of modern society occurs on the level of beliefs .... Interests have always followed ideas ... and have never preceded them." 94 This proves not to have been the case in Russia. While it should be possible for Chaadaev's convictions to exist in the realm of publicly sanctioned personal debate, there is no legitimate public space for personal political expression; thus the content of Chaadaev's opinion becomes confused with the very boldness of the fact that he holds one.

Chaadaev's Philosophical Letters did, in fact, circulate among Russian readers, despite the best efforts of Russian and Soviet authorities alike to suppress them. As with Pushkin's encounter with a manuscript copy of his own poem "Kavkazskii plennik" in Puteshestvie v Arzrum, to be discussed in the next chapter, or Herzen's statement that he wrote in order to send forth his work and his ideas, Chaadaev successfully put in motion a traveling imprint of himself that reached the far corners of the empire, and succeeded in leaving a trace of its author for future generations, as the extent of literary and intellectual reference to Chaadaev throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reveals. Conversely, Chaadaev's life can be read as a text, or as a meaningful set of experiences that both reflect and inform the content of the Letter. Chaadaevthe orphan who lived in other people's houses throughout his life, who did not marry, who disappeared from society for long stretches, and who, on more than one occasion, deliberately provoked the Tsar with highly personal expressions of criticism and discontent-embodied a figure apart, one who stood outside of his society and time and who spoke "unspeakable" things. His resignation from the army and the scandalous publication of the Letter served to make Chaadaev visible as an individual and created an important role for him in Russian history. Despite the self-aggrandizing motivations that may have lain behind such gestures, these actions were understood by his contemporaries as a public

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statement about the perceived absence of a place in history and in the public sphere for educated Russians. The Romantic image of Chaadaev suggests an individual outside of time and place, a Russian prophet-vagabond whose social homelessness reflected a national condition. The appearance of Chaadaev's Philosophical Letter would prove to be a seminal moment in Russian literary-historical consciousness. With its starkand public-assertion of Russia's cultural nomadism and isolation from Western Europe, the Letter, essentially a literary expose of Western perceptions of Russia, was extreme in its bold statement of Russian inferiority. In saying this "out loud," as it were, Chaadaev created a reference point for future philosophical discussions of Russian history. Nothing before Chaadaev's Letter, not Karamzin's History of the Russian State or Pushkin's work on Peter the Great, had posed so directly the question of the special nature of Russian history, and the questions he posed remain relevant to this day. 95 Chaadaev left a deep mark on Russian national consciousness and, in so doing, committed an action that would save its author from the transience of a life not lived on a grand historical stage. In a unique confluence of biography and text, Chaadaev articulated the special Romantic concerns with alienation, isolation, and homelessness in a set of powerful metaphors. Orphaned in his nation and in his family, Chaadaev, more than any other Russian literary figure, embodies a paradigmatic imagethe russkii skitalets, or nomadic Russian wanderer-at odds both within Russia and in the West. Pushkin, Goncharov, Herzen, and Dostoevsky would take up the image of a vagabond identity articulated by Chaadaev. This image of the Russian astray would offer a powerful paradigm for constructing the Russian self

in relation to history.

CHAPTER THREE

A Poet Astray Pushkin and the Image of a Nomadic Wanderer

Then for a long time I led a nomadic life, wandering first in the South, then in the North, and yet I never broke free from the borders of boundless Russia.

-A. S. Pushkin, Puteshestvie v Arzrum What exile from himself can flee? -Lord Byron, Chi/de Harold

The

poet Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin occupies a central role in the Russian literary-historical imagination: he is the emblematic Russian poetthe most Romantic of Russian Romantics-and has typically been viewed as the quintessential Russian, or even as an embodiment of Russian identity. As Levitt has noted, "Pushkin's" semiotic value exceeds the influence of his literary work in the Russian cultural sphere. 1 Or, as Greenleaf and Moeller-Sally claim, Pushkin's role as "cultural forefather" has meant that the Russian public has been '"imprinted' with his image and cult." 2 Strikingly, despite the large amount of scholarly work dedicated to Pushkin's role as a cultural icon, little attention has been paid to a core aspect of Pushkin's image: how wandering, and specifically the image of a nomadic wanderer, informs the articulation of Russian Romantic identity that Pushkin offered to his contemporaries and subsequent generations of readers. 3 As with aspects of the work of Chaadaev, Goncharov, Herzen, and

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Dostoevsky, the Russian identity that emerges in the idea of "Pushkin" is marked in a fundamental way by cultural nomadism-Russian identity is represented through Pushkin's persona and several key characters as unfixed and as lying outside the borders of Western European civilization and history. The figure of the nomadic wanderer became a convenient symbol for Russian self-definition because it reflected anxiety on the part of an educated Russian elite over Russia's perceived alienation from Europe and its seeming lack of a defined national path. As we saw in the Introduction, the notion of the national path, or linear progression toward a national-historical endpoint, acquired special importance in the context of Romanticism and especially in the German Romantic philosophy that forms the foundation of modern nationalism. This was especially the case in the work of Herder and Hegel, where nations were conceived of as traveling a specific path toward their fullest realization and contribution to history. 4 Against this background, then, it is hardly surprising that in Russian Romantic literature, and in Pushkin's work especially, the image of the Russian wanderer received such clear and memorable definition. Pushkin does not explicitly make use of the figure of the nomadic wanderer to represent the alienated state of the individual and the nation in his work, as Chaadaev does when he identifies Russians as nomads in his first Philosophical Letter. Rather, an image of a homeless and rootless Russian poet-wanderer emerges as a central element of Pushkin's symbolic aura, both in the facts of his biography and in his poetic oeuvre. Through "Pushkin," Russian identity comes to be embodied in the figure of a wandering exile. While this image typically articulated individual alienation from society and the natural world, in the Russian Romantic and post-Romantic imagination, Pushkin-as-nomadicwanderer came to represent the nation as a whole and its fateful alienation from a perceived European community. As noted earlier, Romantic emphasis on the expression of both national and individual character meant that these categories overlapped. National character might be envisioned in terms of individual symbolic imagery and the individual could be understood to be representative of the nation as a whole. This symmetry was amplified in the Russian case, where questions of national and individual identity emerged with particular force simultaneously. "Pushkin" the Russian aristocratic liberal poet of the early nineteenth century functions as the embodiment of the Russian Romantic individual. Moreover, he represents the Russian subject for whom the constraints of imperial Russian society rendered the assertion of individuality an inherently political, uncomfortable, and potentially rebellious act. 5 The central concern of this chapter, then, is the importance of the trope of nomadic wandering in Pushkin's historical image and in his work, specifically the early poems "To Ovid" ("K Ovidiiu," 1821), "The Prisoner of the Caucasus"

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("Kavkazskii plennik," 1822), and "The Gypsies" ("Tsygany," 1823-1824), and in his later travelogue, Journry to Arzrum (Puteshestvie v Arzrum, 1835). These are the central texts in which concerns with history, with borders of all kinds, and with the poet's own traveling reputation inform the image of what might best be termed a Russian poet-errant. Before turning to the poems themselves, I will briefly consider some aspects of the poet's own itinerancy.

Pushkin the Russian Wanderer: A Romantic Biography The Romantic period saw the blurring of distinctions between writers' lives and their texts to an unprecedented degree; Pushkin is arguably the best example of such a phenomenon in the Russian tradition. Like Chaadaev, he was received by his contemporaries according to a Byronic model; thus, those aspects of his biography that set him apart from the norm were seen as privileged markers of special poetic status and as worthy of symbolic interpretation in the same way as his poetic texts themselves. 6 For Pushkin, his Romantic biography begins with his family heritage. In addition to a long noble lineage on his father's side, Pushkin's ancestry was notable for the fact that his maternal great-grandfather was African and had enjoyed favor at the court of Peter the Great. The poet was proud both of his aristocratic origins and of his exotic ancestor. This wellknown fact of Pushkin's biography bears repeating here for its resonance with the Romantic features of the biographies of other writers considered in this book, such as Chaadaev's orphanhood or Herzen's illegitimacy-Pushkin and the others to a certain extent occupied the position of an outsider in conventional Russian society. 7 Pushkin early on added the status of rebel to his Romantic persona as a result of his provocative behavior, the liberal bent of his writing, and his close friendships with many of the future Decembrist leaders. His rebellious reputation was cemented in the public eye by the appearance of his politically provocative "Ode to Liberty" ("Vol'nost'. Oda.") in 1817, in which the eighteenyear-old poet referred to the murder of Alexander I's father. Alexander initially threatened Pushkin with exile to Siberia, but his punishment was commuted to exile to the South after the intervention of highly placed friends, including Chaadaev and the poet Vassily Zhukovsky. 8 Even this lesser sentence, however, guaranteed that Pushkin's poems would hereafter be received by the Russian readership as politically sensitive, even dangerous: Pushkin was now a political figure, even if ultimately a less radical one than many of his peers. Like the other writers considered in this book (with the exception of Karamzin and Goncharov), Pushkin committed a political gesture in writing, for which he

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received a harsh political punishment. In the Russian context, writing and selfexpression were an important part of a scripted mode of behavior associated with political rebelliousness. It is worth recalling that Romanticism is an especially writerly literary mode, one in which reading and writing-and especially being a poet-are essential components of the project. Evidence of the importance of this symbolic connection between writing and political action, as well as of Pushkin as the primary actor in this role, may be found in the memoirs and recollections of his peers in the early 1820s. These future Decembrist writerrebels cited encounters with "Pushkin"-that is, with both the poetry and with the persona of the rebellious poet-as a significant moment in their own political development. Reading "Pushkin" the poet-rebel outweighed the reading of the actual poetic works in terms of social importance. 9 In Pushkin's career, long absence from the capitals of Moscow and Saint Petersburg meant that his reputation, along with the circulation of his work, had to function as a stand-in for his person. The ability of his texts to travel to the cultural center in his absence, the circulation of his work in Russian society, and the early reception of Pushkin as national poet all served to create a cultural myth or presence that extended far beyond the poet himself. As Sandler has shown, a sense of remove, or distance from the center, is a primary feature of Pushkin's poetic voice, one that she attributes to his prolonged experience of exile. 10 Building on Sandler's use of the category of exile, I would suggest that exile in regard to Pushkin should not be considered only in terms of distance from the center, but also in terms of movement, travel, itinerancy, and the symbolically charged theme of wandering, motifs that are very much present in his work and that inform his persona. In this context, the topos of nomadic wandering serves as a statement about the problematic nature of Russian identity and the difficulty the Russian poet faces in inhabiting the role of national writer in the Russian context. Exile is typically conceived of as a more or less static state: the exile is theoretically banished from home for a transgression, political or otherwise, to a distant locale from which he cannot leave or return home, despite his implicit desire to do so. For Pushkin, however, the years of exile he endured were a badge of importance and political resistance. They also meant that he experienced a life of extensive movement as well as remove. His exile consisted not of static imprisonment in one place, but of extended travel around the southern space of the Russian empire (the Caucasus and the Crimea) between 1820 and 1824, a period which he referred to early on as his "wandering life." 11 The defining aspect of these locations was not so much their "awayness," or distance from Moscow and Saint Petersburg, as it was their exotic, Oriental nature. At a time when a high cultural premium was placed on travel to just such locales,

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banishment to the Caucasus and the Crimea could be viewed as an opportunity as much as a punishment. Exile afforded Pushkin the opportunity to participate in the by then well-known scenario of the poet-traveler. The dislocation from Russia's cultural capitals his banishment entailed-a form of homelessness, given Pushkin's remove from "home" or the center-was compounded in a counterintuitive manner by the denial of Pushkin's repeated requests to travel abroad. The denial of permission to travel to European capitals such as London or Paris formed, in effect, another level of exile for Pushkin. In a period in which travel itself was a tremendously popular and important literary-cultural phenomenon, this was a harsh punishment. The refusal of permission to travel abroad was all the more severe in Pushkin's case since many of his compatriots traveled to Western Europe and spent extended periods of time there, such as Viazemskii and Chaadaev (the latter left for Europe just as Pushkin was sent into exile). Like writing and rebelliousness, travel was a key characteristic of Romantic behavior, linked as it was to the search for the self as well as to the fashion for Orientalism. Denial of the right to travel abroad stripped Pushkin of an aristocratic privilege, as well as the opportunity to participate in what had formed an important cultural experience for educated Russians since the appearance of Letters ofa Russian Traveler. 12 I am not attempting to dismiss Sandler's important argument about the pervasiveness of exilic remove in Pushkin's work. Rather, I wish to create a framework for exploring the complex and often contradictory ramifications of distance, detachment, and-most importantly-movement for Pushkin as a writer and as an icon of Russian identity. I use the terms movement and wandering here, instead of the word travel in order to emphasize that Pushkin's movements were not always self-motivated or leisurely in the way the word travel implies. Further, the word movement has important connotations in terms of Romantic philosophy. As discussed earlier, the very notion of movement-as opposed to stasis-formed a fundamental basis of Romantic thought regarding the nature of life as a journey, and of the individual as a traveler striving toward a return to a lost harmony between the self and the world. Finally, the centrality of wandering in Pushkin's early work articulates a deeply Russian concern with homelessness and rootlessness. How do homelessness and nomadic wandering, coupled with remove from cultural centers (Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Paris and London), manifest themselves in Pushkin's writing? What is the connection between a peripatetic life, exile, and an anxiety over disappearance from cultural-historical memory that is so palpable in Pushkin's work? How do these inform the image of Russian identity that emerges in important texts such as "To Ovid," "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," "The Gypsies," and journey to Arzrum?

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Tue Lyric Self as Nomadic Wanderer in the "Southern Poems" The space of Pushkin's exile corresponded to Europe's Romantic Orient, for he traveled to the Caucasus, the Crimea, and Bessarabia in 1820-1824, a route that roughly paralleled Byron's travels in the "East" through Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece in the early 1800s.13 The experience of exile offered Pushkin a variety of literary roles: poet-traveler to the East, Russian imperial observer of conquered lands, and rebellious poet-subject banished to the hinterland. I do not wish to retrace here the work of the many scholars who have treated Pushkin's time in the South, but rather to show how the image of wandering is a central, yet overlooked, aspect of these poems and of the later Arzrum text. 14 In fact, it was the figure of Aleko from "The Gypsies" who would particularly embody the idea of the "Russian wanderer" for Dostoevsky almost sixty years later. The persona of the nomadic Russian wanderer created in these early poems would have profound repercussions for the discussion of Russian identity throughout the nineteenth century. In the sections that follow, I examine how this facet of Pushkin's poetic persona comes to light in "To Ovid," "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," and "The Gypsies." Not traditionally considered to be Byronic in the same manner as the other Southern poems, "To Ovid" is yet important for what it reveals about the development of a distinct Pushkinian identity that consistently appears caught at or just beyond the borders of civilization, and that is characterized as both an exile and a wanderer. The lyric self in "To Ovid" who finds a home in exile is mirrored in the image of a wanderer that informs "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" and "The Gypsies," the subjects of the following section.

"To Ovid':- 1he "Self Willed Exile" Pushkin's 1821 poem "To Ovid" is dedicated to the famed Roman poet-exile, who was banished from Rome to the present-day site of Constanza, Romania, in AD 8-very near to that part of the Crimea where Pushkin spent part of his own exile. "To Ovid" initially appears to treat Ovid's plight of banishment to an unknown and "barbarian" land in a sympathetic manner. As the poem progresses, however, sympathy for Ovid diminishes as he is contrasted with the lyric subject of the poem, also an exile, but one whose fortitude casts Ovid's misery in an unflattering light. Pushkin's "severe Slav" (surovyi slavianin) is the antithesis of Ovid's lachrymose Roman. Ovid represents the classical tradition and the forebears of modern poetry, while Pushkin's latter-day Russian exile is styled as a descendant of the nomadic, Asiatic, and distinctly non-literary, Scythian warriors who threatened Ovid's lonely bastion of Roman civilization

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in AD 8. 15 In the course of "To Ovid," Pushkin creates a new model of exile, one that is radically different from the traditional version, and that represents a specifically Russian Romantic form of the punishment. In the Russian context, exile is indicative of political status, and the remove it entails from the watchful center serves as an Edenic haven and counterintuitive space of freedom for the oppressed Russian subject. Pushkin's poem asserts that Ovid's paradigm of exile is one of unceasing loss and lament: gone are his friends and family, the luxurious life of a respected Roman citizen, and his influence and fame at the court of Augustus. Ovid's unfortunate situation is compounded by the implacability of the Emperor Augustus, by the necessity of taking up the sword at an advanced age to fight off barbarian intruders, and finally, by his death in remote Tomis despite his declared wish to be buried in Rome. In Pushkin's rendering, Ovid, sent away against his will to a place that he fears and despises, is consumed by the act of remembering Rome: he writes poetry about it, sends letters to it, and attempts to receive permission to return there, all as encapsulated in the collection of exile poems, Tristia. For Ovid, exile is the forced removal from the center/home to the periphery; it is also a banishment from civilization to the hinterland that cannot be conceived of in any other way. These oppositions have special meaning for Pushkin in demonstrating the very different nature of his own exile, and hence any nuance or tension in the original Tristia is overlooked in Pushkin's treatment of it. 16 Where Ovid regrets and remembers, Pushkin the "severe Slav" experiences exile along the Black Sea coast in more or less idyllic terms, in which recalling the center does not play any explicit part. On the immediate, physical level, that which Ovid saw long ago-cruel winters, ice, and snow-is replaced in Pushkin's view with warm skies, fields bursting with corn, and green grass: ''A scintillating sun here circles overhead;/ [... ] Here withered pasture herb to brilliant greening yields." 17 The miserable space Ovid describes in Tristia is transformed into a heavenly backdrop, and Pushkin's exile suggests more an admission to a rustic Eden than banishment from (urban) civilization. 18 The suggestion of the idyllic in Pushkin's exile is carried further in the poem's reversal of the most basic feature of exile-banishment from home against one's will. Where Ovid is a reluctant exile who does little but pass on his "futile moan" to posterity, the poem's Russian subject identifies himself as a "self-willed exile," who understands Ovid's tragedy but does not share it: "Myself, hardbitten Slav, I did not shed such tears; I I understood them, though, [self-willed exile] (izgnannik samovol'nyi)." 19 The distinction between kinds of exile articulated here reveals a contrast between Slavic and Roman identities: Ovid is Roman and a victim; Pushkin is "severe" and the master of his own fate. Russian exile is not a tragic

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fate, but a desired one. The lines above even suggest that the "hard-bitten Slav" and the "self-willed exile" are equivalents, or that there is something essentially exilic-or desirous of exile-about Slavic identity itself, such that exile is a natural state for a Russian poet. Pushkin's assertion that he has chosen exile suggests that he considers himself an active participant in his own fate and that exile is an outcome he desired to enact for himself. Pushkin's liberal, critical poems constituted a political act, and he received a political-and public-punishment for them. The fact of his exile demonstrated Pushkin's commitment to certain political ideals in this period and proved his resistance to Russian autocracy. It authenticated his position as a Russian Romantic writer, one who faced political consequences for his writerly actions. This was a scenario that would also come into play for Chaadaev and Herzen, as well as Dostoevsky. In Pushkin's case, exile guaranteed a sought-after reputation for him in Russia as rebellious and even potentially dangerous. In a peculiarly Russian inversion, it also functioned as a means of attaining a highly desired freedom. Rather than bringing about a loss of status or position, exile very likely increased Pushkin's standing in the eyes of his liberal contemporaries; at the same time, removal from the centers of Moscow and Saint Petersburg allowed Pushkin to practice one of the most highly valued features of Romanticism: relative independence and travel in remote, exotic locales. 20 It is also tempting to consider the scenario of Pushkin's exile in terms of the Romantic plot of the doomed wanderer, whose crime against God-or other higher powers-leads to banishment from society or civilization. Though it is not stated in the poem, Pushkin, like Ovid, has offended the emperor. While the two poets are distinguished by their historical circumstances and their differing interpretations of their situations, they do share the physical space of exile. For both, the Black Sea coast is the outer edge of their respective empires. It is also a symbolic meeting point of East and West, North and South, civilization and hinterland. Pushkin stresses the liminal nature of this space by identifying it as a border: "Your lyre's caressing voice has not been silenced yet; I The [boundary] still resounds with you and your regret." 21 This border space is not only the former edge of the Roman empire and the contemporary limit of the Russian empire, but it is also the site of Ovid's grave. The trace of Ovid's earthly presence allows Pushkin access to the ancient poet and enables him to address Ovid directly: "Ovidius, I live not far from that still shore/ To which you, banished here, brought centuries before / Exiled paternal Lares, and where you left your ashes." 22 Ovid's ashes make this ground fertile soil for poetic inspiration in 1821. Despite his identification of himself as a Slav, and hence as separate from the Roman classical tradition, the proximity of Ovid's grave provides Pushkin with a link to this tradition. Notably, Pushkin has access to the

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Roman classical tradition because of Russian imperial expansion, an issue which will be addressed in the next section. That the two poets are linked more by spatial nearness than by historical or cultural similarity proves to be a central aspect of the poem. Exile to the South, and proximity to Ovid's grave, brings the poem's Slavic subject close to the classical literary tradition, and it ties him to the immortality that this tradition brings. Notably, however, this shared border space is marked by death, both in Ovid's actual demise and Pushkin's imagined haunting of the spot after his own death: "Yet if a distant scion heard of me and came/ To search the length and breadth of these forsaken places / [... ] My grateful shade would rise and fly to welcome him.'' 23 The indication that Pushkin may someday be buried in the same place as Ovid aligns Pushkin with an ancient poetic lineage and presupposes that he will achieve some measure of Ovid's fame and importance. Perhaps more importantly, it also suggests that Pushkin identifies as his spiritual home the space of exile itself, located at the outer edge of the Russian empire, just as Ovid's grave was at the limit of the Roman empire. Instead of desiring to be buried back in Saint Petersburg, the Russian exile dreams of being buried at the periphery. Imagined interment in the space haunted by Ovid's memory serves to fix a trace of Pushkin's presence in the same territory, even to write over Ovid's trace in a kind of graveyard palimpsest. Departure from home-whether for purposes of exile or travel-can be construed as a figurative death. Writing about travel, about being away, serves to counter this metaphorical self-loss in two ways: by capturing experience abroad for an implicit home audience and by inscribing the self into the travel destination. Writing bridges the gap that stretches between the center (home) and the traveler and realizes the traveler-subject's (or exile-subject's) existence, thus forming a sort of temporary home space for the traveling writer. The meeting between Ovid and Pushkin takes place in the complex space of the text itself, the "home" for these two exiled writers and the place where their experience is historicized. 24 Pushkin's poem, the written artifact of his exile, travels back to the center, just as Ovid's poems did in the eighth century; in other words, the poets both inhabit their texts and travel through them. 25 The image of Ovid as a poet-in-exile proves to be a significant trope in Pushkin's work, reappearing as it does in his letters and other poems, most notably "The Gypsies." An Ovidian anxiety over the proper representation in absentia of an author who must rely on his reputation and others' memory of him to maintain his presence in the capitals, is reflected here. 26 Pushkin's concern with representation is tied to an insistence on leaving a mark or trace in history, an important emphasis that recurs in the later travel text Journey to Arzrum, as will be the subject of discussion later on.

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Pushkin's address to Ovid proves to be a richly layered contrast between the fates of the two exiled poets. Ovid's lamenting, banished lyric persona serves as a foil to Pushkin's own self-projection as a "self-willed" Russian exile. Yet the imagined meeting with Ovid's trace or memory allows Pushkin to claim a dual patrimony: both that of the Scythian ancestors of the Northern Slavs and the Roman classical tradition. This complex ancestry places Pushkin in a range of seemingly contradictory lyric positions, from Scythian/barbarianpoet to voluntary exile, contradictions that allow him to claim for himself the advantages of civilization and the power of uncouth barbarians. The barbarianpoet and voluntary exile finds himself so at home in exile, and in the foreign, liminal border space of the Russian empire, that he imagines he will or ought to be buried there: it is his home ground. This is a fitting final spot for one who both claims the European tradition as his own and identifies with civilization's antithesis, nomadic barbarians. Like the "poet-barbarian" of "To Ovid," the protagonists of two of Pushkin's most important Southern poems, "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" and "The Gypsies," are similarly spiritually homeless figures who are most fully realized only as inhabitants of the border zone at the outer edge of the Russian empire. The lyric subject of these poems-alternately styled as a captive or a gypsyfinds himself driven beyond the borders of conventional society, yet unable to join the potentially seductive world of the Eastern other.

The Prisoner and the Gypsy: Captives of the Border "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" (1822) and "The Gypsies" (1823-1824) are among Pushkin's most typically Romantic works and have traditionally been viewed as exemplary of the Byronic influence. In recent years, they have also been the subject of critical examination as singularly important texts of Russian literary imperialism. 27 Both concerns are relevant to a full understanding of the poems, but they fail to address an important aspect of these works: the distinctly Russian identity that emerges with particular force in both "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" and "The Gypsies." While contemporaries of Pushkin such as Viazemskii viewed "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" as Romantic, but not Russian, both poems, on the contrary, do present a Russian Romantic identity, one that is drawn from the symbolic image of the doomed or demonic wanderer. Pushkin's self-fashioning in "To Ovid" as an exile-in-Eden, or as a poet at home in exile, finds a curious development in these poems. In both, the protagonist leaves Russian society, either in search of freedom or because he has transgressed against its rules, but neither "hero" succeeds in finding a refuge beyond Russia's borders.

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While the Prisoner's transgression may rest on nothing more than his quest for freedom, both Aleko (whose motivations are darker) and the Prisoner are inadvertently destructive to those they encounter outside of Russia: death follows their intrusion into an alien sphere, as in the case of the demonic wanderers of Romantic literature. 28 The end of both poems presents these solitary figures as wanderers caught in the shifting border zone of an expanding Russian empire. Unlike the protagonist of "To Ovid" who finds a home in what are for Ovid the outer reaches of the known world, the protagonists of the later poems are incapable of such a resolution to the dilemmas of exile and dislocation.

"The Prisoner ofthe Caucasus" "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" was composed in exile and published in Saint Petersburg in Pushkin's absence. The poem achieved tremendous popularity, as would his other Southern poems "The Robber Brothers" ("Brat'ia razboiniki," 1821-1822), the "Fountain of Bakchiserai" ("Bakchiseraiskii fontan," 18211823), and "The Gypsies." Though Pushkin would later disavow his admiration for Byron, the character of the Prisoner derives from such classic Byronic figures as Childe Harold and the Prisoner of Chillon. Pushkin's unnamed Russian prisoner, melancholic and cold to the point of death, leaves Russia in search of freedom: "Freedom! You alone / He still sought in a deserted world." 29 The poem suggests that the evils of Russian society have driven the Prisoner to leave the bounds of his native land: He came to know people and society And knew the price of unfaithful life. Having found betrayal in the hearts of friends, And in thoughts oflove but a mad dream, Bored of being the customary victim Of long-ago despised vanity, And double-tongued hostility, And simple-hearted slander, Abandoner of society, a friend of nature, He left his native

bounds

And flew to a faraway place With the merry apparition of freedom. 30

As with Pushkin's other traveling heroes-Aleko, Onegin, and Pushkin himself in Journey to Arzrum-the motivation for the journey lies in escape from a

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confining, yet alienating society and entrance into a seemingly freer world beyond the borders of Russia proper. While the Prisoner seeks external freedom, it is clear that internal freedom is his real, but unattainable, goal. In true Romantic fashion, the Prisoner is not at home at home, or anywhere else. 31 He has not committed a crime in the conventional sense, but he has strayed from society's conventional paths and left the bounds-or bindings-of his native land. Though nominally under the control of the Russian empire, the Caucasus was a dangerous region for early nineteenth-century Russian travelers, even those who wished to escape Russia. Yet the state ofjihad against Russia in the Caucasus from the 1820s on did not prevent the development of a Rousseauist image of the Caucasus as a wild and free antidote to the constraints of civilization in the Russian popular imagination. 32 lhe Prisoner's escape from society ironically results in his being taken captive by the very people, and in the very territory, understood by him to most represent freedom. As his shackles attest, rather than conquering the exotic East, the Russian Prisoner has become subject to Circassian power. The Prisoner's captivity in the Caucasus raises interesting questions concerning the poem's relationship to the literary Orientalism of the period. In his own time in the South, Pushkin did not approach the border area he describes in the poem, but, in a letter to his brother Lev, he did describe the frisson of danger he experienced when passing through the region-a small whiff was enough to inspire the premise of the poem. 33 The purported circumstances of the poem's creation, and the emphasis on the imminence of danger, suggests in counterintuitive fashion that the Prisoner may have set out not so much in search of freedom, as of captivity itself, the state of which was a popular Romantic topos. 34 The Prisoner's markedly Byronic character (signaled by his melancholy gaze and troubled emotions) further suggests that he may well be a receptive-----even perhaps "captive"-audience to the Orient before he has even arrived in the Caucasus. In thrall to literary expectations surrounding travel to an exotic and dangerous East, the Prisoner is a self-willed captive (recalling the "self-willed exile" of "To Ovid") who appears to desire the experience of being taken captive. One might call this captivity tourism. The ambiguous fusion of Romantic motifs-captivity, travel in the Orient-is yet further problematized when the Prisoner fails to be captivated by that which should enchant him the most: the Circassian girl who falls in love with him and helps him to escape his imprisonment. The failure to be seduced-by the girl, by the Circassians, or even by the Caucasus itself-is perhaps the central element of the poem (and one that will reemerge, in somewhat different fashion, in Journey to Arzrum). Eastern captivity proves less than captivating, and the Prisoner remains cold and melancholy even in the face of strong literary expectations of attraction, recognition, and dominance. 35 So established were these expectations that the

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Prisoner's lack of romantic interest in the Circassian girl provoked surprise and dismay on the part of many of Pushkin's readers. Alienated, emotionally crippled, and destructive, the Prisoner is also a demonic figure: his "fiendish" behavior (as it was perceived to be) is in keeping with the demonic archetype and the poem's denouement. 36 The Circassian girl's exposure to Russian civilization in the person of the Prisoner renders her unfit for life in either sphere, an outcome that drives her to suicide, despite the Prisoner's change of heart toward her at the last minute. A5 Sandler and Layton have noted, the Circassian girl is one-dimensional: she has no object but to love, is silent but for discussion of love, and kills herself when not loved in return. 37 Yet her fate reveals the nature of the Prisoner's destructive presence in the mountainous realm beyond Russia's borders, and it is ironic: she is captivated by the Prisoner, rather than the other way around. When the Prisoner leaves Russia, he experiences captivity and becomes the indifferent object of another's love, a reversal of his earlier situation in which he loved without hope. Both romantic situations are imprisoning, however. In leaving Russia, he has left a certain socio-cultural sphere, one associated, if not always comfortably, with Western European civilization. Not at home within these confines, the Russian Prisoner is also not at home in the "uncivilized" world on the other side of Russia's borders. He exists only as a fugitive-captive, fleeing back and forth between two constrictive realms. His fate seems to suggest an existential entrapment: "the Russian" (as he is called by the girl) cannot reach any destination. He can neither fully depart from Russia nor arrive in the Caucasus; likewise, he cannot fully return to Russia as he now brings his experience of the Caucasus-and his role in the girl's death-with him. He is a displaced traveler, who is last seen in flight, presumably back to Russia, but his destination remains beyond the margins of the text. The Prisoner's pursuit of freedom is further compromised for the reader by the epilogue's assertion that the Prisoner's captors will soon be subjugated themselves, to the encroaching forces of European political and cultural hegemony in the form of Russian military might. The Circassian girl's death toward the end of the poem suggests as much the coming destruction of her way oflife at the hands of the Russian army as it does doomed love for a demonic Russian wanderer. These two forces-the Russian wanderer and the Russian army-are perhaps more closely linked than they initially appear. The issue of empire emerges with unusual urgency in the epilogue to "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," and the nature of its unexpectedly pro-imperial stance has been the subject of much scholarly debate. 38 Pushkin's apparent endorsement of the Russian imperial project in the Caucasus does not fit easily with Romantic sympathy for rebellion against authority and movements for national independence. 39 Given the

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nature of Russian national discourse at the time, however, in which the idea of individual freedom was integrally related to the expression of a national idea, the seemingly contradictory impulses of the poem may be seen in a different light. As Ram has shown, some of the Decembrists were favorably disposed to imperial expansion and did not see Russian military victories in the South as an obstacle to their liberalizing demands at home. 40 Given these circumstances, Pushkin's imperialistic approach to the Circassians and to the Caucasus more generally may reflect a Russian Romantic response to that part of the Orient that lay within Russia's imperial reach. The odic nature of the epilogue also serves as at least a partial identification of Russia with the image of Oriental power, as had been common in the eighteenth century (e.g., Derzhavin's favorable comparison of Catherine II to an Eastern ruler in his 1782 "Ode to Felitsa''). The Prisoner on one level sympathizes with the Circassians and admires them, but he is also allied with the encroaching forces of "civilization." This is a dual identity much like that of the barbarian-poet presented in "To Ovid." In this instance, however, the border zone is not a habitable place, even for burial. There is no middle ground between Russia and the Caucasus, between civilization and its opposite, or between freedom and captivity. Real captivity does not produce inner freedom for the tormented Prisoner, but, rather more entanglement. The Prisoner is defined by his desire to flee Russia and himself and by his inability to do so. A suggestive picture of Russian identity emerges here: restless, rootless, and yet entrapped.

"1he Gypsies" The image of a Russian astray, yet somehow entangled at the border, is further developed in "The Gypsies," Pushkin's long poem of 1823-1824. As with the Prisoner, the poem's lyric hero Aleko has left Russia for the South. In this case, however, Aleko's departure is explicitly driven by an unnamed transgression he has committed at home, rather than an existential desire for freedom. In flight from Russia, where he is wanted by the law, Aleko travels as far as Bessarabia (Moldavia), the area that lies between the Russian and Turkish empires. Here he encounters a band of Gypsies, and, in an important contrast to the Prisoner, Aleko is captivated by one of the Gypsy women. Unlike the passive Prisoner, Aleko becomes an active participant in the Gypsies' world by forming a romantic liaison with Zemfira and adopting her people's nomadic lifestyle. His apparent inclusion in their group comes to an abrupt end when Zemfira betrays Aleko's love. In an ironic twist, Aleko-outraged by Zemfira's refusal to acknowledge his claim to an exclusive sexual relationship with her-commits a crime of honor

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and passion of the sort that European readers would normally associate with "primitive" Gypsies rather than members of their own world: Aleko murders Zemfira and her lover. Aleko's actions reveal that he has failed to truly enter into the world of the Gypsies. Their emotional bonds are presented as being as transitory, or nomadic, as their stay in any given spot; his are not. 41 Despite his seeming integration into their way of life, Aleko is ultimately too "civilized" to accept or understand the unbound romantic relationship Zemfira has offered him. Ultimately, he is the barbarian. His transgression of the Gypsy code ends with him cast out by the Gypsies, themselves traditional outcasts from society. In an image of desolate solitude, he is abandoned: "And with a bustling start / The light encampment rose as bidden / To leave the night's dread vale behind. / And soon the prairie's depth had hidden / The nomad train. A single cart / Its frame with wretched cover vested, / Stood in the fateful field arrested." 42 Aleko's own nomadism, or lack of connection to any group, is reinforced throughout the poem by his identification as a voluntary (dobrovol'nyi) or migratory exile (izgnannik pereletnyi), and by the comparison to a migratory bird in the lines where he is likened to "[a] careless, feathered singer, / A transient exile [... ]". 43 The association of Aleko with voluntary exile recalls the Prisoner's possible seeking out of captivity in "Prisoner of the Caucasus" and the poet's identification as a self-willed exile in "To Ovid." Like his namesake, Alexander Pushkin, Aleko seems destined to imitate the migratory bird of the poem; movement and the open road appear to be his lot, despite his evident desire to be attached to a group. This is a destiny of solitary wandering, for Aleko, like the Prisoner, seems fated to cause destruction in any world that he inhabits. Aleko also wishes to flee Russia and does so, only to become entangled in a very different world just beyond its borders. In contrast to the Prisoner, however, Aleko has crossed such bounds of behavior and experience that he cannot, or will not, return to Russia. When viewed as a later iteration of the Prisoner, Aleko emerges as a fuller incarnation of an identity in crisis, an identity in flight and exile. Where the Prisoner could still return to Russian society, albeit to an alienated life within its bounds, Aleko is granted no such homecoming; instead, he is left to play out his itinerant nature in absolute terms in a life of literal and eternal wandering. The clash between Aleko's civilized, yet murderous, Russian nature and Zemfira's "uncivilized" nomadic code is underscored in the contrast drawn between Aleko and Ovid in the poem. The reference to Ovid recalls Pushkin's own engagement with this classical model of exile and homelessness in the earlier "To Ovid." For Aleko, the Gypsies are alluring: they represent an escape from civilization, but they do not provide an escape from his own proclivity to transgress social codes of all kinds. Zemfira's father reminds Aleko that he is "not born" to their way of life, and

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uses the story of Ovid to warn Aleko of the danger he faces in attempting to live a life he is not suited to. 44 As the old man's version of Ovid's story reveals, people cast out from their own world do not fare well in a new one: being exiled from one ensures that they will suffer the same fate everywhere. Even if Aleko attempts to embrace his exile and enter into a life with the Gypsies, he cannot escape his own essential rootlessness. Like the Prisoner, Aleko is homeless in Russia: "The road for him lay everywhere, / Everywhere was a place to pitch his tent." 45 Where the Russian subject of "To Ovid" contrasts Ovid's lament with his own desire for exile and the idyllic freedom it paradoxically entails, Aleko's misunderstanding of freedom in "The Gypsies" casts Ovid's plight in a different light. Taken together, the two poems reveal a significant tension over the figure of the exile. In joining the Gypsies, Aleko has failed to note his similarity to Ovid or that he has also been cast out from civilization and that his fate is also one of perpetual personal isolation. Zemfira's father reminds Aleko of Ovid's unhappiness and unfitness for the rigors of life beyond Rome: "You like us and the life we lead, / Though nurtured by a wealthy nation. I Not always, though, is liberation / Dear to a man of tender breed." 46 In his own address to Ovid, Aleko attempts to align himself with the Gypsies, to escape Ovid's fate, when he contrasts the liveliness of the Gypsies with the static and "dead" traditional, historical world Ovid represents: "Love's singer, tell me, what is glory? I Sepulchral echoes, honor's hail, / Renown from age to age redawning? / Or, told beneath the awning [of a smoky tent],/ A [wild gypsy's] tale?" 47 Aleko asks which form of historical memory is more valuable, implying that the "wild tale" is at least as compelling as the written legacy. Ironically, as Aleko's question makes clear, Ovid has remained fixed in the Gypsies' oral memory and he has left a permanent mark on the European literary tradition. Aleko fails to see that while he will also end up as a fixture in Gypsy lore of civilization's outcasts, he will not leave a written trace on the permanent historical record of the civilized world, as Ovid did. Rather, he will remain fixed only in the "unfixed" tradition of oral history, and he will not leave a narrative of his own to balance or contradict the Gypsies' version of events. Aleko comes much closer than Ovid, however, to integration with the Gypsies. As Hokanson points out, "communication is possible" between the Russian and his Gypsy counterparts; 48 this exchange suggests that a Russian such as Aleko is inherently closer to the socio-cultural world of the "wild" Gypsies than was the Roman poet, who was psychologically tied to the static urban center of Rome. The itinerancy of the Gypsies is frequently emphasized throughout the poem by their association with nomadic qualities-they live in nomads' tents and roam around Bessarabia: "Between Moldavian settlements I In clamorous throng the Gypsies wander [kochuiut]." 49 Aleko initially spends "nomadic days" with the

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Gypsies, free from care or complaint, but, in the final verse the reader learns that even the inhabitants of nomadic tents are not free from torturous dreams or cruel twists of fate: "Your ragged shelters, too, are haunted / By omens and oppressive dreams, / Deep in your wilderness, disaster / For [nomad] tents in ambush waits; / Grim passion everywhere is master, / And no one can elude the Fates." 5° Freedom of movement, then, is not a means of escaping an unhappy fate; in Aleko's case, freedom of movement is his unhappy fate. As with kochevnik, forms of the verb "brodit"' (to wander or roam) occur frequently (six times) in the course of the poem, creating an association of motion or movement with both the Gypsies and Aleko. As with "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," the quest for freedom ends badly in "The Gypsies." More so even than the Prisoner, Aleko is a creature of the border, or of the realm just beyond the border. He is homeless and caught between Russian society and its Gypsy double. Both the Prisoner and Aleko are errant wanderers, intrinsically yet fatefully drawn from the center to Russia's outer limit, where they are unable to successfully negotiate its crossing. (In a similar fashion, the narrator of Dostoevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions will later find himself trapped at the Russian-European border.) But Aleko and the Prisoner also function as emblematically Russian figures, representative of an identity formed by a society at odds with itself-not fully part of Europe, yet not fully separate either. So powerful was the image conveyed by the figures of the Prisoner and Aleko that Dostoevsky would treat Aleko (as well as Onegin, whom I do not consider here) as a real social type and as representative of what he identified as the "wanderer" stage of Russian history in his "Pushkin Speech" of 1880. As Dostoevsky's interpretation makes dear, the image of the Russian wanderer (russkii skitalets) would significantly shape perceptions of Russian identity for a long while to come. I would briefly note here that the Prisoner and Aleko are the ancestors of another important Russian wanderer in the South, Pechorin, the protagonist of Lermontov's 1840 novel A Hero of Our Time. Like Pushkin's heroes, Pechorin seeks adventure in the South, in this instance as a participant in Russia's military campaign to subdue the Caucasus. Cold, bored, yet with the suggestion of troubled emotional waters roiling just beneath the surface, Pechorin is a consummate Romantic hero. He engages with Russia's Orient in far more cynical terms than did his predecessors: he does not earnestly seek freedom, but rather sardonically seeks amusement. In "Bela," he pursues a young Circassian maiden, deliberately for the purpose of alleviating his boredom and demonstrating his mastery over others. The situation cannot end well-if only because "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" and "The Gypsies" have already shown the informed reader thisand it does not: another non-Russian maiden dies as a result of her amorous

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attachment to a displaced, rootless Russian whose presence in the realms beyond Russia's borders contaminates those around him. By 1824, when Pushkin was sent back to his family estate, Mikhailovskoe, outside of Moscow, he had become an extremely popular figure with the Russian reading public. The poems considered here, along with "The Fountain of Bakchiserai," had been enormously successful, making "Pushkin" into a wellknown cultural figure, and one who was strongly associated with his characters in the minds of his readers. 51 Just as Pushkin's heroes are wanderers, the epilogue to "The Gypsies" reminds the reader that "Pushkin" the poet-narrator is a traveler, too. In an elision with his poetic double Aleko, the first person narrator describes his own visit to the Gypsy camp. The poems of the Southern cycle might, in their entirety, be viewed as a poetic travelogue in which the poet-traveler discovers the legacy of literary exile, imagines captivity in the Caucasus, wanders through Gypsy camps on foot, and traverses the dangerous border zone. This fusion of poet with traveler, while a key aspect of the fundamental Romantic conception of the poet, possesses an extra importance in Russian national terms. This theme is central to Pushkin's 183 5 prose work Journey to Arzrum, which is not so much a travelogue as a text about travel and the implications of movement and travel for writing and the poet's Russian identity. In a shift from the previous consideration of the personification of the wanderer in Pushkin's "Southern poems," I turn now to an examination of the way movement-or circulation-of rumors, representations, texts, poets, Russians, and even armies permeates this work.

The Russian Poet-Errant: Confrontations with the Traveling Self in Journey to Arzrum In journey to Arzrum, Pushkin's account of his unofficial 1829 trip to the South, the author's identity is itself on the move. The poet's encounters with his own and others' traveling texts, the reach of his reputation, his concern with leaving a trace of the self in space and time, and the frequent narrative shifts-all combine to produce an image of the author as a Russian poet-errant or wanderer within the confines of the Russian empire. Scholars have discussed many aspects of this text, such as its satiric overtones and play with Orientalist views of the East, and it is a complex work that defies easy characterization in terms of genre. The focus of consideration here will be the underexplored meta-textual themes of circulation, writing, and travel that so occupy the narrator. 52 As the French critic Butor suggests, writing and travel are intimately connected endeavors, especially in the Romantic literary mode. This is a connection that bears further examination in a text such as Arzrum, in which the activities of both writing

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and travel are so much in evidence and seem to bear a paradoxical relationship to each other. In this discussion of journey to Arzrum, I look closely at three important elements of the work: the circulation of texts in the cultural periphery of the Russian empire, and the ensuing problematization of observation and representation; the inscription (or historicization) of the traveling writer in space and time; and, finally, the traveling narrator's encounters with various borders: personal, national, and imperial. While the commentary on Orientalism is an important facet of Arzrum, I would argue that the text's concern with the relationship between transience and history plays an equally, if not more, significant role. Played out against a backdrop of history-in-motion-the Russian campaign against the Turks and the expansion of the Russian empirethis concern illuminates several key moments in the narrative. The attempt to record transience, to capture the passing of things and people, plays an important role in Arzrum, where the nomadic writer-as-wanderer attempts to inscribe both self and nation into history. journey to Arzrum was the product of Pushkin's second journey to the South, five years after his youthful exile there. At the time of his 1829 journey to Arzrum, he was at the height of his popularity as a poet, but he was also suffering increasing personal discomfort as his private life and his writing had come under the personal surveillance of Nicholas I and his Chief of Police Alexander Benckendorff. Pushkin had been singled out for special persecution, but the attention also heightened the importance of his cultural role. Tired of awaiting the Tsar's permission to travel to the South, where he wished to join the Russian campaign against the Turks, Pushkin left Saint Petersburg in March without official sanction. He traveled largely on his own as far as the Caucasus, where he caught up with the Russian army and even participated briefly in the campaign. In contrast to his Southern exile of the 1820s, Pushkin's second trip to the South was not a political punishment, but was instead-in a fashion reminiscent of his traveling heroes, the Prisoner, Aleko, and Onegin-an attempt at escape from his increasingly uncomfortable life in the capital. 53 Although Pushkin returned to Saint Petersburg in 1829, the full text ofArzrum was not published until 1835. When it appeared, it was accompanied both by an introduction by the author and, in an appendix, Sylvestre de Sacy's French translation of Maricio Gardzoni's treatise on the Yezidis, a Caucasian people at the time widely believed to be Devil-worshippers. 54 Pushkin's 1835 introduction to the 1829 text situates the main body of the work in the past, immediately dispelling any illusion that the text is a live retelling. The added items reveal that the borders of the main text are porous, and that they allow in fragments from other works, such as Gardzoni's essay or, in the body of the text itself, Thomas

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Moore's "Lalla Rookh." As Greenleaf has shown, such intertextual maneuvers were a common feature of Oriental travel writing. 55 Pushkin's text takes the notion of a literary encounter with other travelers to an extreme, however, as is shown when "Pushkin" himself becomes a character in this intertextual dialogue. A similar device occurs when "Pushkin" makes an appearance in Eugene Onegin, especially in the unpublished stanzas removed from the appendicized fragment, "Onegin's Journey." 56 Pushkin's play with the image of himself as a traveling author in both of these works forms part of a larger statement on the relationship between literature, authorship, and movement, and on the special relevance of authorial itinerancy in the Russian context. That texts travel and have a life of their own is apparent from the 6rst line of Pushkin's introduction to Arzrum: "I recently came upon a book published in Paris last year (1834) with the title: Voyages en Orient entrepris par ordre du Gouvernement Franrais." 57 Pushkin introduces his travel account with a statement of literary wandering in the form of a chance encounter with another travel book. Strikingly, this other travel book is an official French report printed in Paris in 1834, in which Pushkin discovers, not only a mention of himself, but also of the very text-journey to Arzrum-that the reader now holds in his hands. The author of the text, French Consul Victor Fontanier, includes his personal observation of "the Russian poet Pushkin" in his travel account of the Caucasus, written for a French audience. 58 Despite his long-standing wish to travel to Paris himself (Pushkin had once again requested permission to travel to Paris just before his flight to Arzrum), 59 Pushkin was never allowed to do so; yet, he discovers, as if by accident, that "the Russian poet Pushkin" is, in fact, known to French readers. "Pushkin," as observed by a representative of the French government, has traveled from the Caucasus to Paris, and then to Saint Petersburg. This process of peripatetic representation proves to be problematic, for Fontanier characterizes Pushkin as: "A poet distinguished for his imagination, [but one who] has found in the many noble events which he witnessed the subject not of a poem but of a satire." 60 Fontanier's judgment of Pushkin as a satirist of "noble" military campaigns is an important, and potentially dangerous, one since it asserts that Pushkin has failed to honor the recent Russian military victory, a gesture that would be certain to annoy the Tsar. 61 In his introduction, Pushkin takes great pains to distance himself from the French account, asserting that he does not recognize himself in Fontanier's telling: "I would have never thought that it was me that was in question here had I not in the same book found my name among the generals of the independent Caucasian Corps." 62 If the reader is to take the author-narrator at his word, then it would seem that Fontanier has misread him, seeing a satirist rather than a poet. In its very eagerness to defend the author against Fontanier's

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charges, however, the introduction points the reader's attention to the strong possibility of the truth of Fontanier's assertions. 63 Importantly, the narrator claims that he has been misobserved, and this highlights the centrality of the theme of fl.awed observation to Arzrum. The reader is presented from the very beginning with two different "Pushkins": Fontanier's poet-cum-satirist of 1829 and the narrator of 1835 who claims not to recognize himself in Fontanier's telling and who suggests that he is neither a satirist nor an official singer of the deeds of the Russian army. The deliberate ambiguity of the text's tone and intent leaves an opening for a variety of ways in which it might be received by different readers. This ambiguity is the more ironic when we consider that Arzrum is presented more or less in the form of an autobiographical travelogue, a genre that presupposes authenticity and a single or unified subjective viewpoint. 64 Ultimately, these confusions concerning "Pushkin's" identity and intentions throw the very notion of authentic observation into question. Fontanier's supposed misreading of Pushkin's work hardly represents the full extent of the problem of flawed or divergent readings, however. In the same passage in the introduction, the narrator acknowledges that rumors are circulating among the Russian public concerning the potentially satiric nature of the text, as well as the possible existence of unpublished portions. He appears to refute both with the publication of Arzrum: "I would be ashamed to write satires on the celebrated general [.... ] An accusation of ingratitude cannot be left undefended [.... ] That is why I have decided to publish this preface and to present my travelling notes as the definitive version of all that I wrote of the 1829 campaign."65 Such assertions of the text's completeness and sincerity raise the specter that the published text is not complete and that it is, in fact, satirical. They also serve as a tacit acknowledgment of one of the more significant metathemes of Journey to Arzrum: Pushkin's fame, or reputation, at home and abroad. 66 "Pushkin" travels independently of the actual poet: his actions and whereabouts are both distinct and inseparable from Pushkin's own. Just this situation is described explicitly later in the text, when the narrator of Arzrum finds an old, "dirty manuscript" of his own 1820-1821 poem, "Prisoner of the Caucasus," in Lars in 1829. The manuscript appears in approximately the same part of the empire in which it was written several years earlier during Pushkin's exile, suggesting that a version of "Pushkin" has remained wandering about the South even after the real poet had long since returned to Russia. 67 The worn quality of the manuscript suggests it has traveled not only distance, but also through the hands of many readers in the intervening years. 68 It is a physical trace or remainder of a younger Pushkin and his earlier travels, even while its soiled appearance marks the passage of time. The Pushkin of 1829/1835 comments ironically, however, that the

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poem is "youthful," suggesting that the poem's content is static, despite the manuscript's intensive circulation among a variety of anonymous readers. The "Pushkin" represented in the poem is no longer an appropriate reflection of Pushkin the contemporary (1829) traveler. Pushkin's discovery of the old copy of "Prisoner of the Caucasus" at the way station at Lars figuratively marks his return to the territory of the South, and to those exotic lands of his exile that lay outside of Russian national space, yet constituted such an essential part of its imperial imagination. His return to Russia at the end of the text is likewise framed by an encounter with his writerly self (this time his current self, not his youthful, exilic self). At the outset of his return journey, Pushkin reunites with his friends Pushchin and Dorokhov at Vladikavkaz. There he finds Russian newspapers and discovers, as if by chance, that he appears in one of them: "On Pushchin's table I found the Russian reviews. The first article I opened was a critique of one of my works. Both I and my verses were roundly attacked in it." 69 Though he brushes off the critical review and does not name the work in question, Pushkin's final comment in journey to Arzrum draws an important equation-return home (or to Russia) means a return to being critically misread: "That was my first welcome back to my beloved fatherland." 70 As with Fontanier's travel account, Pushkin discovers that others' evaluation of both his person and his work surrounds his actual movements. The fact that these are negative evaluations is a further marker of return; "home" is the place where "Pushkin" is known, but misunderstood. It is a deep irony of Arzrum that a writer who has been so carefully observed by others, and even by such authorities as the Tsar, can be so profoundly misread. Much like the old manuscript of "The Prisoner" in the South, a version of "Pushkin" and his works has continued to circulate in the capital in the real poet's absence. For the narrator of Arzrum, the encounter with the "Pushkin" of 1820-1821 marks his departure from Russia and arrival in the South; his encounter with the "Pushkin" of 1829 marks his return to Russia. The question remains, however, as to whether the real Pushkin can ever be said to fully depart from the persona of "Pushkin," despite their clearly diverging paths. This is, at best, an uneasy relationship, and one that casts Pushkin's role as a historical figure into sharp relief The question of the Russian writer's place in history is a well-noted concern of Pushkin's work, and its presence in journey to Arzrum deserves special comment here. This text raises important questions about the relationship between absence from home-as well as the absence of home-travel, and a nomadic identity that represents Pushkin's uncertain place in history. The anxiety over the individual's relationship to history that surfaces in Arzrum resonates with Chaadaev's assessment (notably, written the same year as Pushkin's trip) of Russia

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as a nation of nomads. Against a background in which Russia's place in history was regarded as not yet defined, and what it meant to be Russian was likewise perceived as not fully articulated, it was difficult to ascertain the individual's place in history. The concern revealed in Journey to Arzrum with preserving not just the author's traces, but those of other traveler-writers, and with creating a record of transience, speaks directly to this anxiety. During a visit to an old fort, Pushkin discovers that previous travelers have carved their names into the rock. These names serve as a monument to earlier travelers' transit: though their names are unfamiliar, they are remembered by each later traveler. 71 While other scholars have noted this incident, especially in light of travelers writing their presence onto the Orient, I would argue that the etched names signify a lineage of travel, that they are an inscription-or historicization---of itinerancy itself Pushkin adds his own name to the list in part by carving his name, but also by writing about this travelers' palimpsest. Future travelers to the fort, those who have read Pushkin, will recall his text when they encounter the names on the walls; they may even go there on purpose to look for his name. Pushkin's recording of encounters with various historical personages, such as the Generals Ermolov and Paskevich, as well as his Decembrist friends, whom he meets during the trip, fulfills a similar function. In keeping track of whom he encounters during his travels, Pushkin captures the trace of these individuals, but he also leaves a record of who has seen him, or where mention of an encounter with Pushkin might appear in other people's diaries or letters. As is clear from the attention to Fontanier's observation of him in the introduction, journey to Arzrum is a text that, in the guise of a travelogue or travel essay, reveals a great deal about the author as traveler, perhaps even more than it reveals about the travel destination. The themes of writing, travel, and history come together most significantly in the memorable fictional depiction of Pushkin's chance encounter on the road with the body of his friend and fellow writer Alexander Griboedov. This encounter did not actually occur, a fact that perhaps renders Pushkin's imagining of such an event even more suggestive. Griboedov's name appears earlier in Arzrum, when Pushkin discusses his friend's poetry with General Ermolov, the former Commander-in-Chief of the Caucasus. The meeting with Ermolov is important as well: the General had fallen into political disgrace under suspicion of ties to the Decembrists. At the time of Pushkin's journey, Ermolov was living under house arrest on his estate near Orel. Once the coming conqueror celebrated at the end of Pushkin's own "The Prisoner," the General is now himself a prisoner: of the Russian government. More importantly, the dismissal of Ermolov from his post has retired him from the center stage of Russian history: he has been made to "disappear" from social memory, despite his formerly elevated position. 72 As we

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will see, disappearance, especially of "remarkable people," is critically important where Griboedov's fate is concerned, so the mention of his name together with Ermolov's is especially striking. Griboedov's promising diplomatic career in the Orient was cut short when Muslim protestors attacked the Russian mission in Tehran where he was stationed. During the attack Griboedov was beaten and beheaded, and gruesome rumors circulated in Russia that an angry mob had rendered his body unrecognizable save for a small scar on one finger from a duel. In the fictionalized account of Arzrum, Pushkin happens upon a wagon train carrying Griboedov's body back ro Russia for burial. Griboedov's body had been brought that way, but two weeks earlier. Pushkin takes the liberty of narrating an imagined and symbolic encounter with a group of men pulling a cart along the road: "A few Georgians were following the cart. 'Where are you from?' I asked them. 'From Teheran.' 'What are you carting?' 'Griboeda."' 73 The Georgians' mispronunciation of Griboedov's name represents a cultural "scrambling": they do not know the "Griboedov" that Pushkin and his implied readership do. This mistake, invented by Pushkin, suggests that, despite Griboedov's success in the South (including his career advancement and recent marriage to a Georgian princess), the Orient is a dangerous place for a Russian writer, one where he might actually vanishhis body destroyed and his name garbled. As Pushkin's fabrication of the Georgians' mistake reveals, Griboedov's death abroad leaves his memory vulnerable and subject to misrepresentation, even erasure. The narrator laments: "What a pity that Griboedov left no [notes]! The writing of his biography would be a task for his friends; but wonderful men vanish from among us leaving no trace. We are lazy and incurious .... "74 Even more than Griboedov's death, Pushkin regrets that he has died without leaving any notes, or without leaving a written trace of himsel£ This is indeed a tragedy for any writer, but perhaps it is doubly so for a Russian writer who cannot be guaranteed a place in history, and who is thus specially tasked with creating that place for himself through writing. For Pushkin, Griboedov's failure to commit his life to paper looms larger than his actual death, since it raises the possibility that Griboedov might be forgotten, that he might disappear from cultural memory. The unfortunate Griboedov leaves behind only a mutilated corpse to travel the mountain roads of the Caucasus and to just miss an actual encounter with a friend who would preserve his name. Notwithstanding his early literary success, Griboedov has left no permanent inscription of his own on the South, but, rather, bears its violent marks. The space of the Orient/ Caucasus here is especially dangerous to Russian writers. Not only do they fail to leave a mark, but they do not return intact; in this case, Griboedov's

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physical self has even been erased (at least in rumor) or written over by a historical narrative that was not of his own choosing. Griboedov's fate, though real and terrible, is reminiscent of that of the Prisoner and Aleko. These lyric heroes crossed the border from Russia into the exotic South, only to face violence and rejection. Pushkin's invention of the encounter with Griboedov's body, then, functions as a form of memorialization, a means of recovering the missing notes that would give permanent life to Griboedov's experience. Not only does Pushkin include a brief written memorial to Griboedov's life, but he honors his death by staging a scene in which he poses as witness to Griboedov's final journey, thereby affixing Griboedov's last trip into the space and time of the mountain pass. The reality of Griboedov's death realizes the worst fears of the traveling writer: he dies a violent and anonymous death abroad, his body is erased beyond the point of recognition, and he is denied the opportunity to capture his experience in writing. No artifact remains of his passing until Pushkin retroactively invents one. The entire text of Arzrum may even be said to fill in the "blank" left by Griboedov's missing notes: Griboedov's friend and contemporary, also a writer, travels to the same region only a short time after Griboedov's death, but this time lives to tell the tale. There is a clear and ironic tension here between the danger of disappearance in the manner of Griboedov and the persistence of uncontrolled traces of the self such as the old copy of "Prisoner of the Caucasus," the ad hominem review of Pushkin, other people's accounts of his presence, and the misinterpretations of him and of his work. In this respect, there are, again, notable parallels to the figure of Pechorin in A Hero of Our Time. Like the narrator of Arzrum, Pechorin proves difficult to pin down. Despite-or perhaps because of-the many versions of him in circulation (Maxim Maximich's account, the narrator's own encounter with him, Pechorin's diaries), the real Pechorin is ultimately unknowable. His motivations and true feelings remain a mystery, as does his unseen death on the road somewhere in Persia or on the road to Persia (an echo of Griboedov's infamous demise). The real Pushkin and the real Griboedov prove to be just as elusive, despite the fact that a multiplicity of texts and readers/viewers exist in their orbit. The real Griboedov, like the fictional Pechorin after him, dies before the writer/narrator can catch up to him, before he can capture him fully on paper. What is a fictional device in A Hero of Our Time (albeit with strong autobiographical overtones) is a semi-autobiographical conceit in Arzrum, but the message of both texts is the same: the self is a mobile construct, an inherently shifting and itinerant entity that is always in circulation, always in motion, never at rest and not fixed. The identity of the self is relative; it is determined by space, time, and point of view.

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The Infinitely Receding Russian Border AB the attention to traveling texts and writers implies, borders-and the Russian border in particular-are of special relevance to Journey to Arzrum. While the focus on borders may be understood as part of the larger Romantic concern with limits and their transgression, and with liminal or taboo space, 75 the treatment of the Russian border here acquires extra political and symbolic meaning. The nature and extent of Russian national and imperial boundaries forms a central concern of the text. Tellingly, the most important border moment in Journey to Arzrum never occurs. Pushkin very nearly encounters Russia's imperial boundary at the Arpachai River, just after he has passed by Mt. Ararat, but he proves unable to definitively locate it, much less cross over it. When his guide informs him they are by the Arpachai, Pushkin recalls that this river marks the southernmost border of the Russian Empire. In keeping with the unofficial, unsanctioned pose of his trip, he seizes the unexpected opportunity to depart from Russia by immediately fording the river with his horse, only to find that the Russian army has already taken the opposite side from the Turks: "Here is the Arpachai," the Kazak told me. The Arpachai! Our border! This was worth Ararat. I galloped off towards the river with an inexpressible feeling. I had never yet seen a foreign land. For me, the border possessed something mysterious; since childhood travel had been my favorite dream. For a long time thereafter I led a nomadic life, wandering first in the South, then in the North, and yet I never broke free from the borders of boundless Russia. I cheerfully rode into the sacred river and the good horse carried me across to the Turkish side. But this bank had already been captured: I found I was still in Russia after all.76

Scholars have noted the frustration expressed in this passage in light of Pushkin's many unsuccessful attempts to travel abroad. 77 Notable, however, and largely overlooked, is the fact that despite this frustration, Pushkin formulates a distinct identity for himself here as a nomadic wanderer. He has traveled first in the South, then in the North, literally living a "nomadic life," yet somehow he has never succeeded in crossing the significant border, that of "boundless Russia." Pushkin presents himself here as a wanderer within Russia, a nomad at home, one seemingly driven to nomadism by the very fact that he has been denied the opportunity to leave. It is not an excess of freedom, but rather its opposite, that drives Pushkin to the various corners of the empire and renders him homelessat-home. His nomadic wanderings are ironically emptied of the one power they might be expected to bestow-the ability to live beyond boundaries or to escape

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repression and surveillance. More deeply, it may well be that his inability to leave his homeland makes it impossible for him to truly know what home is. As Abbeele theorizes, the concept of home is fundamental to any journey, but is, paradoxically, only conceivable after the advent of departure. 78 Such a paradox applies to the concept of homeland as well: "Russia" can only be fully grasped as such from beyond its borders; thus the Pushkin who has never been able to depart from Russia can never take Russia's full measure from afar. He cannot know it as a delimited space or a defined entity. Rather, for him it is a constantly expanding, infinite-and hence ungraspable-phenomenon, not a homeland. The very size of it, its boundlessness, makes it impossible for Pushkin to know its limits, or to define his own place within it. Boundlessness is itself a prison, and the Russian border proves to be an elusive entity. Pushkin's intention of escaping the "limits of boundless Russia" is foiled by the empire's expansion, which occurs almost simultaneously with his own movements. Ram suggests that it is "Pushkin," in fact, who embodies the Russian border in Arzrum. 79 He cannot travel beyond himself: he is the embodiment of the Russian subject and even, as such, the embodiment of Russia itselfwhere he travels, so, too, does Russia. While Pushkin's reputation succeeds in traveling beyond national limits, the actual Pushkin cannot move as freely, nor can he escape his own boundless, yet indefinable, Russianness. In a curious comparison, the Russian border vanishes from Pushkin's text much as it does from Dostoevsky's 1863 Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. 80 While these texts are extremely different, and appear at different points in Russian history, they both suggest that there is something intrinsically elusive about the Russian border, and they do so in direct contrast to the pronounced emphasis on crossing the border and leaving the confines of Russia in Karamzin's 1791-1792 Letters of a Russian Traveler. As we saw in Chapter 1, Dostoevsky's narrator and Pushkin's seem to face opposite problems. As Dostoevsky's narrator travels by train from Saint Petersburg to Cologne, he fails to notice the border or to realize that he has left Russia. Ultimately, Dostoevsky is unable to leave Russia for Europe since the distinction between the two no longer exists for a thoroughly Europeanized Russian elite. Yet just as for Pushkin, this missing border makes it impossible to leave Russia. The problem of the Russian border is significant for Herzen and Goncharov as well. For Herzen, crossing the Russian border is a strange sort of crossing, marking as it does for him a symbolic passage from homeland to a "land of shadows," or from life to death. In Frigate Pallas, Goncharov approaches the Russian border unusually from the east, as he crosses the liminal, frontier space of Siberia toward home-in this case, an imagined point of origin that proves to be an infinitely receding home point. The actual limits of home and homeland prove impossible to locate in all of these texts.

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The Russia ofjourney to Arzrum is an ever-expanding entity, an empire on the move that acquires and absorbs new lands and peoples and is therefore difficult to delimit or define: Where does it end? What does it encompass? In a reversal, the Russia of Winter Notes is an infinitely contracting space, the opposite of an empire in that it has surrendered its own identity to a more powerful outside influence. The narrator of Pushkin's text is Russian: he travels with the Russian army, has a taste for Russian black bread, and, most importantly, he is "Pushkin," the Russian national poet who finds traces of himself in various corners of the empire. "Pushkin's" essential Russianness travels with him; indeed, he cannot escape it. Dostoevsky's traveling narrator (as noted in Chapter 1) suffers from the reverse-he is no longer Russian at all, but a European colonial subject, "abroad" in Russia, yet a "foreigner" in Western Europe. He cannot successfully navigate the border in either direction. Pushkin cannot escape the limits of Russia, while Goncharov cannot return to the point of origin; Herzen, who does cross the border, remembers it ever after in traumatic terms as a death. These traveling authors are all stalled in the act of crossing the Russian border. With the exception of Herzen, it is elusive and they simply cannot find it. Thus, they remain figuratively poised in the unsettled liminal space surrounding the border. These texts voice an explicit concern with Russian identity as one that consists, at least in part, of attempting to go somewhere else, to leave Russia-if only in order to know the contours of Russia itself. This is a task that proves impossible. In the passage quoted above, Pushkin claims that travel abroad was a fond dream of his since childhood. The childhood origin of the desire to travel, especially to Western Europe, likewise proves to be an important association for several of the Russian writers considered in this book. The trope of childhood wanderlust signals Pushkin's inclusion in a Russian literary lineage initiated by Karamzin. Herzen, Dostoevsky, and Goncharov will later make the same claim of a childhood desire to travel in My Past and lhoughts, Winter Notes, and Frigate Pallas, thus suggesting that a childhood longing to travel is a key aspect of Russian identity (or of future Russian writers' identity). Travel-or the desire to travel-functions as a marker of Russianness, as it does a marker of writerliness. In contrast to the travel accounts of Karamzin, Herzen, and Dostoevsky, Pushkin does not include a departure scene in his account of travel to the South, perhaps to avoid commenting on the unofficial reasons for his departure. For Pushkin, however, departure is more complex than simply courting official displeasure. First, Pushkin does not leave the confines of Russia during his travels. Second, "Pushkin" the celebrity, the observed cultural phenomenon, travels more widely than Pushkin does himself, and has already reached places as far away as Paris and Lars. Finally, Pushkin has already traveled to the South, during his first exile of 1820-1824, suggesting that his 1829 journey is a retracing of his own

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steps, as he himself notes at multiple points, rather than a fresh journey. Pushkin does travel further than "Pushkin" does, but only when he finally reaches locales distant enough that no one recognizes him. In this space, however, he either passes unnoticed or is misinterpreted. Return is marked by the poet's reencounter with "Pushkin" in the negative review of his work at Vladikavkaz. The fact that "Pushkin" has been an ongoing subject of Russian cultural debate in the traveler's absence suggests that he never fully departed in the first place. 81

The Nomadic Self I would briefly note here some of the ambiguities of Pushkin's complex persona in journey to Arzrum. In addition to the themes of history, the circulation of texts and writers, and the vanishing Russian border, the persona of the narrator proves to be an important element ofArzrum. In frequent repositioning throughout the piece, the narrator is at once a poet, a soldier's fellow traveler, a Russian, and an outsider whose remove from the Russian military theater is frequently signaled by the presence of an involuntary bond with "others," or non-military people also on the margins of the campaign. While it is a commonplace of Pushkin studies to note his protean changeability, and to interpret it, following Dostoevsky, as a special skill, this very changeability may itself be read as a lack of fixity, or as a traveling or nomadic persona who migrates from the position of poet to that of gentleman and pseudo-soldier. What Dostoevsky will identify as Pushkin's great power-his chameleon-like ability to absorb and imitate all literary influencesmay also be understood in terms of a lack of defined identity. As in the earlier Southern poems, the narrator simultaneously positions himself as the exileprotagonist and as a Romantic traveler. In his travels to the Caucasus in 1829 he operates as a poet-traveler/military observer accompanying the Russian army on an unsanctioned leave from Saint Petersburg. This unorthodox status produces confusion about his identity; it also provides privileged access to people and places at the edges of the Russian military theater. 82 In a well-known episode from his trip, Pushkin, dressed in his signature frock coat and top hat, is repeatedly mistaken by the local inhabitants for a non-Russian or a doctor because he is not in military uniform. His appearance in the army camp attracts the curiosity of a captured pasha who is quick to note a connection between the Russian poet and what he identifies as his Eastern counterpart, the dervish: One of the pashas, a skinny little old man and a terrible chatterbox, was talking to our generals. Having seen me in my frock coat, he asked who I was. Pushchin

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For the pasha, Pushkin's status as a poet transcends any boundaries of national or ethnic definition. Despite the conflict between the Russians and the Turks, and the pasha's own status as a prisoner, he defines art, and especially the artist, as standing above such ties. Ironically, this address is made to a Russian poet who literally cannot escape his fatherland and who suffers difficulties with translation, as is evident from Fontanier's supposed misrepresentation of "Pushkin." The latter is figuratively homeless precisely because he cannot escape the limits of his homeland or reputation, not because he transcends them. The trouble here is that the pasha fails to recognize "Pushkin" and sees only "poet," a category for which he possesses his own culturally distinct definition. The fact that the pasha defines poets as intrinsically homeless and stateless hardly seems accidental; however, in the imagined Eastern context presented here, these are powerfully positive qualities. Perhaps Pushkin the figuratively nomadic Russian poet would feel more at home with his homelessness in this Eastern context, in which lack of attachment to place or things appears to be an elevated state of being. Pushkin's own entrapment within national and personal boundaries receives further elaboration in the encounter with his suggested double, the dervish. The two poets are incomprehensible to each other, despite the pasha's assertion of their shared ability to transcend all boundaries 84 : "Coming out of[ ... ] the tent I saw a young man, half naked, in a sheep's wool hat, with a club in his hand and with a fur (outre) across his shoulders. He was shouting at the top of his lungs. I was told that this was my brother, the dervish, who had arrived to greet the victors. He was forcibly driven away." 85 The sight of the half-naked young man dressed in furs and shouting at the top of his lungs in an unfamiliar language makes for an unlikely comparison to the urbane Pushkin, distinguished throughout his journey in the South by his civilized European dress and participation in the Russian civilizing mission. Rather, the only feature the poets share is their role as champions of exactly those national feelings that the pasha supposes they have overcome. The dervish is tied to his Turkishness, and to his place and time, as firmly as Pushkin is tied to his. Ironically, the Russian government does not grant poets or dervishes any official place in the campaign, while the pasharepresentative of Eastern authority-accords both high status. This irony suggests that there is something intrinsically "Eastern''-or "other"-about poets; it is in the East that they are officially recognized.

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In this vein, as scholars such as Greenleaf have demonstrated, Journey to Arzrum is conscious of Orientalist discourse and is to a large degree preoccupied with satirizing European perceptions of Eastern exotica. The dervish above is an outlandish caricature, not an artist capable of moving audiences. The narrator's attention is repeatedly called to expressly marginal phenomena such as harems, plague camps, and hermaphrodites. Pushkin discovers that a prisoner supposed to be a hermaphrodite is merely a eunuch, and no great mystery or aberration of nature after all. He notes about the condition, however: "According to the accounts of travelers, this illness, known to Hippocrates, is often met with among the nomadic Tatars and the Turks. 'Khoss' is the Turkish name given to these sham hermaphrodites." 86 In an East feminized and otherwise othered by an Orientalist discourse, the assignation of gender mutability to its inhabitants by European travelers is not surprising. 87 Pushkin has himself already noted the presence of gender confusion among the Kalmyks (another nomadic group) in the person of the Kalmyk girl who wears trousers, smokes a pipe, and scares off the usually flirtatious Russian poet. In the case of the Tatars and the Kalmyks, nomadic identity has been associated with genuinely blurred gender boundaries, as well as with false gender ambiguity, a combination that reinforces both the real and reputed liminality of the native peoples of the Caucasus region. Curiously, however, the themes of hermaphroditism (or gender mutability) and nomadism are pertinent to the narrator's own persona in Arzrum. In an oft-noted incident, Pushkin accidentally enters a bathhouse on the women's day. Despite the fact that his presence should form a significant intrusion, the bathing women do not pay any attention to the Russian traveler, suggesting that, for them at least, he does not represent a forbidden male intruder. He is emasculated in this setting, perhaps because he is a poet rather than a soldier, or, more simply, because he is a Russian or European traveler, and thus does not figure into the constructed gender categories of the local culture. The narrator has explicitly associated gender ambiguity with nomads, so the mutability on Pushkin's part suggests that there is something "nomadic" about his own identity as a traveling Russian writer. He is not confined to one position, and he moves between fixed social borders of Russian and other, even while he cannot escape Russia itself. Journey to Arzrum is a text consumed by movement: texts, writers, travelers, even empires are on the move in its pages. Pushkin has proliferated into many "Pushkins," astray in the far corners of the empire, and even traveling as far as Paris. The emphasis on movement is reflected by the narrator's own changeable persona: the poet has a nomadic ability to inhabit different poses, to circulate, and to proliferate, while he also enacts a life of enforced rootlessness. The journey is a retracing of the steps of his exile, and it is undertaken in response to yet another denial of permission to leave Russia. The denial of this wish produces a restless

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internal movement and, further, makes it impossible for Pushkin to know Russia from without, to comprehend home and homeland as distinct entities. A final note is in order here on the theme of traveling texts and authors. Pushkin refers to the Odyssey in Journey to Arzrum, and it is tempting to draw a comparison between "Pushkin" and Odysseus. Both are wanderers: Odysseus seeks to return home while Pushkin seeks a way out of Russia, in part as a means of discovering what home is. At the very least, the reference to the Odyssey underscores Pushkin's presentation, even if parodic, of himself as a homeless, nomadic wanderer. 88 It remains for Arzrum to inscribe the wandering "Pushkin" into history.

What was the role of the poet, writer, and liberal in the autocratic and expansive Russian empire? How best should Russians encompass the different facets of a nation that saw itself both as an heir to the Enlightenment and as Europe's other? The persona associated with "Pushkin" that emerged from works as diverse as "To Ovid" and Journey to Arzrum embodies the difficulties of these questions. The Pushkinian model for the Russian individual in the Romantic period was that of a nomadic wanderer, navigating a fragile border zone between East and West, North and South, and between the bounds of Russia proper and the expanding limits of its imperial grasp. The discourse of the Russian self as nomadic, or unfixed, drew heavily from the symbolic field of "Pushkin" and his works. As the next chapter will illustrate, the influence of this discourse of the nomadic Russian self would be felt even in the most unexpected places, including Ivan Goncharov's eponymous novel about Russia's most famous homebody, Oblomov.

CHAPTER

FOUR

''A Journey around the World by I. Oblomov" Goncharov's Unlikely Eternal Russian Traveler

Listening to my moaning and groaning, you will of course ask, why did I depart? [... ] Permit me this: Did I really depart? From where? From Petersburg? In this vein can't you also ask why I departed from London the other day, from Moscow several years ago, and why I will depart from Portsmouth in two weeks, etc.? Really, am I not an eternal traveler, like anyone who has no family and no permanent corner of their own, no 'domestic hearth' as they used to say in old novels?

Those who possess all of these things do not depart from them. But the rest of us live out our time continuously at way stations. That's why I've only gone out (vyekhal), and haven't really departed (uekhal).

-Ivan Goncharov 1

The lines above come from an early passage in Ivan Goncharov's 1858 account of his travels around the world aboard the Russian ship the Frigate Pallas. 2 The book of the same name describes his nearly three-year journey from 1852-1855 as official secretary on a Russian government-sponsored mission to Japan. The purpose of this expedition was to establish trade and diplomatic relations with Japan and to visit the Russian colonies on the west coast of America. Neither aim

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was accomplished: the Americans preempted the Russians in their negotiations with the Japanese, and the outbreak of the Crimean War made travel across the Pacific to the United States impossible. The fact of the journey itself, however, was to prove to be of enormous literary significance for Goncharov (1812-1891), who referred to his travel text as a "rose among the thorns," signifying that this was the only literary achievement about which he had positive feelings. Frigate Pallas is a complex work, part travelogue, and part extension of Goncharov's novelistic ambitions. As we will see in this chapter, it is also one that engages deeply, if unexpectedly, with the question of Russian identity and the discourse of nomadic wandering, offering in the process a new dimension to the image of the Russian wanderer. The passage quoted above is important and worthy of a close look as it sets the stage for this chapter's discussion. As it demonstrates, the narrator of Frigate Pallas defines himself as an "eternal traveler" for whom a round-the-world voyage is but the latest manifestation of an intrinsically itinerant life. Such a definition is highly surprising for the author of Oblomov, who, like his famous character, was known for his reclusive and sedentary habits. The novel Oblomov features a protagonist who rarely leaves the house. Yet travel plays a central role in the context of Oblomov, one that will be explored here through the lens of Frigate Pallas, a text which in many ways overlaps with the more famous novel. The narrator of Frigate Pallas frequently dons the guise of an Oblomov-like traveler; that is to say, he writes as a homebody abroad who experiences travel in part as an agony of separation from home and in part as an extension of an essentialand existential-homelessness. For Goncharov, the form of the travelogue offers a convenient medium in which to further develop the issues of domestic or internal displacement that also appear in Oblomov. Displacement is a literal fact for the traveling narrator in the passage abovehis lack of a family and domestic hearth has engendered a vagabond life of itinerant stays at way stations, with no real attachment to family or place. The language of this passage strongly recalls the attributes that Chaadaev identified as specially characteristic of Russian life in his First Philosophical Letter (1829): "Look around you[ ... ]. No one has[ ... ] even any domestic hearth[ ... ]. In our houses we are as if billeted guests; in our families we possess the look of strangers; in our cities we resemble nomads [... ]." 3 The narrator of Frigate Pallas describes his life in similarly metaphorically nomadic terms. As I will argue, the figure of a Russian "eternal traveler" plays a central role in Frigate Pallas, just as it does, paradoxically, in Oblomov. The fact that the narrator of Frigate Pallas frequently adopts the voice of Oblomov suggests that Frigate Pallas should be read as a text not only with deep ties to Goncharov's novel, but, more pertinently, as the planned, but never completed section of the novel tided "Oblomov's Journey," and as a unique version of the topos of the nomadic Russian wanderer. 4

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The passage quoted in the epigraph offers an intriguing, if paradoxical, view of the narrator's relationship to travel, one that has larger ramifications in regard to a discourse of Russian identity in which travel, movement, and instability are paramount. The Russian traveler of Frigate Pallas is caught in an existential quandary: he cannot truly depart from Russia because he is already "away" even in Russia. The departures he has made from London, Moscow, and Saint Petersburg are but the rippling aftereffects of an original, defining-yet unnamed-leave-taking. While this original departure is not described, it clearly lurks just beneath the surface and amounts to a severance from a point of origin. Cut off from his roots by this original act of departure, the narrator has been on the move ever since. On the biographical level, the passage recalls Goncharov's own departure from his childhood home in Simbirsk for school in Moscow at the early age of ten. 5 In literary terms, it also suggests the fictionalized plight of Oblomov, sent away from the ancestral estate Oblomovka to Saint Petersburg at a young age to complete his education. In the novel, Oblomov never recovers from this traumatic separation from home and fails to put down new roots. The distinction made in the epigraph between absolute departure and the resulting incremental series of leave-takings is subtly expressed in Russian by the use of verbal prefixes. The verbs-vyekhat' and uekhat'--both mean to leave or depart, but they emphasize different aspects of the action of leaving. AB the narrator maintains with the use of vyekhat' to describe his journey abroad, it is not so much a departure as it is a move in an outward direction, from within one space to another, or a removal of oneself from a given space. The verbal prefix "vy'' stresses motion outward. It is here sharply distinguished from departure in and of itself, or the act of fully leaving one place, as expressed by uekhat'. This perfective form describes leaving and does not offer any indication as to the direction or destination of the departure. In Goncharov's portrayal here, departure from Russia is not an action that can be accomplished; instead, he can leave one place for another, and this happens frequently. Goncharov's traveler-in a similar fashion to that of the narrator in Dostoevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863)-cannot realize the full weight of international borders because he cannot truly depart from Russia, largely because he is not at home in Russia to begin with. As he describes it, he was already on the road, already away from home. Goncharov cannot leave home in the national sense because he does not possess a home in the domestic sense: in this formulation, home and homeland are inextricably intertwined, and the domestically homeless traveler also lacks a secure place in the homeland. The image of the narrator's adult life as one of eternal motion caused by departure from a childhood home or familial domestic hearth suggests internal nomadism. Like Pushkin's doomed wanderers and Chaadaev's nomads, Goncharov's traveler is internally displaced,

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or emotionally and psychologically dislocated within his own country. This brieflook at the epigraph suggests the central questions of this chapter: how does Frigate Pallas engage with the Russian discourse of travel-as-identity, developed in Pushkin's and Chaadaev's works, among others? What does travel around the world, to many places, but importantly both to Europe and within Russia itself, offer in terms of exploring definitions of Russian national consciousness? The fact that several key passages of Frigate Pallas are narrated in the voice of Oblomov gives rise to further related and intriguing questions: how might Frigate Pallas function in relation to Goncharov's 1859 novel Oblomov, for which the author initially intended to write a chapter entitled "Oblomov's Journey around the World"? How does the figure of "Oblomov abroad" embody or illuminate elements of the complex discourse of Russian identity and nomadic wandering? Goncharov has traditionally been viewed as something of an outsider in Russian letters, in part because of his conservative views and position as a government censor, but a closer look at his work reveals how deeply his texts engage with the discursive practice oflinking Russian identity to nomadic travel and national homelessness. 6 The text of Frigate Pallas is unique among Russian travel texts in that it depicts travel to the West, the East, and within Russian imperial space itself. These multiple encounters-with the classic Western other in England, with the "foreign" East of Africa and Japan, and with the unknown at home in Siberia-call forth a nuanced treatment of the phenomena of Russian home and homeland. In this chapter I will focus on two distinct, yet related elements of the text: the paradoxical image of Oblomov abroad, especially in England-where home and homeland are remembered from afar-and the narrator's "domestication" of Siberia into a familiar space, peopled by literary eternal Russian travelers. The image of a remembered Russian home-and an awareness of the absence of this home-links the travels in England and Siberia in an unexpected way, and proves to be central to the articulation of Siberia as a home-like space, the most familiar feature of which is the absence of home.

Oblomov and Frigate Pallas Perhaps the most famous stay-at-home in European literature, Oblomov, the protagonist of the eponymous 1859 novel, is renowned for his inability to engage in the normal routines of work and society. He remains instead in his run-down Saint Petersburg apartment and sleeps through much of the day, incapable of addressing the mounting difficulties of debt, dust, and the collapse of his provincial family estate, Oblomovka. It is surprising at first to learn that Goncharov planned for his inert protagonist to complete a journey,

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but Goncharov's letters indicate that he meant for the novel to include a section entitled "Oblomov's Travels," detailing Oblomov's voyage around the world. fu the narrative now stands, Oblomov does not travel farther than the bounds of Saint Petersburg, yet some vestigial traces of the planned voyage remain in the novel. Oblomov is partially roused from his paralytic stupor by travel plans he makes with his energetic friend Stolz. Under Stolz's guidance, Oblomov begins preparations for a journey-going so far as to purchase a suitcase and worry about getting a passport-but fails to see these plans through when Stolz is called away ahead of time. Oblomov's forgotten interest in the larger world is evidenced by a few dust-covered books about Africa that lie open on his desk. In the novel, Stolz's travel plans with Oblomov provide an ironic contrast to the small sphere of Oblomov's hermetic life.7 Such a stark irony was not part of the original conception for the novel, however. Letters Goncharov wrote in 1852 while in the first stage of his real journey make plain his early intention to send Oblomov abroad: "but I don't despair of someday writing a chapter entitled Oblomov's Travels: there I will try to illustrate what it means for a Russian man to have to crawl into his trunk-all on his own-and know what's lying where, worry about the baggage, and for the tenth time in an hour fall into despair, sighing over Mother Russia, Filip, and so on." 8 A similar intention is stated in a second letter: "is this really a letter? You still don't understand? This is an introduction [ ... ] to A Journey around the World, in twelve volumes, with plans, sketches, a map of the coast of Japan, illustrations of Port Jackson and native costumes, and portraits of the inhabitants of Oceania. By l Oblomov." 9 Though "Oblomov's Travels" did not appear in the novel, the pose of Oblomov abroad, developed in the letters, does occur consistently in the text of Frigate Pallas. The traveling narrator "Goncharov" dons an Oblomov-like persona at many points and, as other scholars have noted, Frigate Pallas is partially narrated by Oblomov. 10 As I argue elsewhere, Frigate Pallas should in part be read as the planned, but never completed "Oblomov's Journey" described in Goncharov's letters. "Oblomov's Travels" do exist, but they are situated in an unusual relationship to the novel they would seem to be a part of; they have been displaced to another text. Frigate Pallas, then, offers valuable insights into the character of Oblomov and to the larger significance of the novel. Frigate Pallas is connected to Oblomov, a fact that was more obvious to Goncharov's contemporaries than it is today, as the texts very nearly overlapped in terms of their publication in the late 1850s: the full novel Oblomov appeared in print one year after the complete text of Frigate Pallas was published in 1858. The character of Oblomov was already well known to the Russian public from the fragment of the novel that had been published in 1849, "Oblomov's Dream," and his voice was recognizable in Frigate Pallas. 11 Goncharov worked on both

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texts after his return from his travels, and the proximity of the publication dates allowed contemporary Russian readers to read these texts more or less together. Despite significant revisions to later editions of Frigate Pallas in 1879 and 1886, Goncharov retained the passages that are narrated in Oblomov's voice, although the novel had long been completed without the once-planned journey. 12 The unorthodox relationship of "Oblomov's Travels" to the novel is reminiscent of the migrations of "Onegin's Journey," the "off-stage" travels of the protagonist of Pushkin's 1833 novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin, in which the once-planned chapter devoted to Onegin's peregrinations around Russia ended up as a fragmentary appendix to the novel. In both cases, the "journeys" themselves travel or circulate around the perimeters of the novels they are associated with. The implications of "Oblomov abroad," or of setting on the road a character so wholly defined by stasis and attachment to home, are profound. What kind of traveler can Oblomov be? What does it mean for a homebody to go abroad? As is suggested by the letter quoted above, "Oblomov's Travels" are intended to "illustrate what it means for a Russian man" to travel; Oblomov is meant to be a representative national traveler. Like the title of Karamzin's Letters ofa Russian Traveler, this asserts that there is a Russian way of traveling, or that travel is in some sense unique for Russians, at least in literary accounts. Unlike Karamzin's traveler, however, the Oblomov-like traveler will not primarily dwell on his experiences of the new and foreign, but will be concerned with the mechanics of travel on one's own and the pangs of homesickness. What distinguishes this Russian traveler is that he suffers: travel is a hardship, not a luxury, both because he is forced to care for himself and because he must leave his homeland, the familial space of "Mother Russia." This Oblomovian traveler leaves two familiar/ familial spaces behind: the home circle of domestic comforts (as well as, literally, the domestics themselves) and the motherly embrace of the national family. The absence of these domestic spheres looms large for Oblomov abroad. Like Karamzin's Letters ofa Russian Traveler, Frigate Pallas is framed through a series of "letters," largely written after the author's return. The device of the letters is not simply a generic cliche, however, but a demonstration of this traveler's continued attachment to home. He continuously looks back to Russia and experiences travel through his relation of events to an imagined or remembered home audience. The writing of the letter is a connection, and it is also a "home" space itself, a temporary dwelling space that the traveling writer can inhabit while away. Even when he is not explicitly identified as Oblomov, the narrator speaking in an Oblomovian guise is identifiable at distinct points in Frigate Pallas by several characteristics: his evident distress at the very act of traveling, his homesickness, his explicit identification of home as Oblomovka (the fictional family estate),

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the prolonged recollection of home/ Oblomovka, and, finally, by a repudiation of the modernity and technology he associates with Western Europe. Notably, this Oblomov-like narrator appears most prominently in Frigate Pallas during Goncharov's stay in England (the only European nation he visits) and again during the description of Goncharov's passage across Siberia on the last leg of his journey. In other words, the voice of "Oblomov abroad" appears when the narrator's Russian identity is brought to the forefront of the narrative, either because of a direct confrontation with the West or because he is crossing the Russian frontier, a liminal space that is both home and not home. These sections offer important and varied perspectives on the nature of Oblomov's Russian identity as refracted through travel. I turn first to the phenomenon of Oblomov abroad before discussing Oblomov in England and Siberia.

Oblomov Abroad For the character of Oblomov abroad in England, travel is as much a means of placing home in sharp focus as it is a way to experience a new place. Home and its absence are paramount for the narrator of Frigate Pallas, who asserts: "Travel for me still does not so much possess the charm of novelty as it does the charm of memory." 13 Indeed, as he explains, travel is a means of drawing a parallel between home and away, or of continuously remembering home in the face of abroad: [... ] before my eyes still flash native and familiar roofs, windows, faces, customs. I see new and strange things and immediately measure them by my own yardstick [arshin]. I have already told you that the unconscious result of a journey is a drawing of a parallel between the foreign and the native. We are so deeply enmeshed in the roots of home ground, that wherever and however long I shall go, I shall carry with me soil of my native Oblomovka on my feet, and none of the oceans of the world can wash it off 14

Much as he might like to see the foreign world now surrounding him, this traveler experiences an interference of memory-he cannot stop the projection of images of home onto his new surroundings, of seeing the new through reflections of the old. The paradox of travel, then, lies in the opportunity it affords for remembering, for recalling what has been left. 15 In this instance, as I will show, it allows for the "recollection" of a fantasy version of home, of what a Russian home should look like. This idyllic precision is only possible with the distance travel creates.

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As noted in my introduction, it is travel that enables the individual to conceive of home at all, and especially to conceive of himself as having been at home. The spatial-temporal remove that travel entails makes it possible to delimit or define home in a way that is not possible while the subject is at home. As Abbeele asserts, "the positing of a point we can call home can only occur retroactively. The concept of a home is needed (and in fact it can only be thought) only after the home has already been left behind." 16 In this conceptualization, home is realized-recognized-solely through its absence. From the moment of departure to arrival in England, then, the narrator who has claimed to be an "eternal traveler" with no domestic hearth of his own is able to reconstruct a home through the actions of memory and comparison. That this home is explicitly identified as Oblomovka is worthy of close attention: such a place is not just any home, but one that embodies an archetypal national homeyness, even as it is a highly problematic domestic sphere. In Frigate Pallas, Oblomovka functions as a point of origin for the traveling narrator; it is the place he purports to come from and the place that shapes his vision of the rest of the world. It is a point of origin that Goncharov's contemporaries would recognize from the 1849 fragment "Oblomov's Dream," bur one which they would also suspect of no longer being in existence, if indeed it ever had been: the fictional Russian idyll is already crumbling from within. By the opening of the novel, the estate Oblomov left as a child has become decrepit and unrecognizable, in part because of his departure. Oblomov in the novel is so "enmeshed in the roots of home ground" that he is unable to free himself from Oblomovka's grasp on his psyche even when thousands of miles away in Saint Petersburg. In similar terms, this imaginary home grips the narrator of Frigate Pallas; idealized in recollection, it cannot be dispelled by other sights and sounds. As Abbeele theorizes in Travel as Metaphor, a fundamental paradox of travel is the fact that departure causes the "original" point of origin, or the point of origin as it was constituted at the moment of departure, to disappear, to be permanently displaced in time and space from the traveler: one can never return to precisely the same point that one started from.17 The narrator of Frigate Pallas arguably inhabits this crisis of dislocation, and it is one compounded by travel beyond Russia's borders: "home" for this traveler no longer exists, yet its presence continues to intrude on his consciousness wherever he goes. In fact, foreign travel may even make his homeless situation easier to bear. After all, a traveler is allowed, even expected, to feel homesick when abroad, while the internally displaced Oblomov in Russia has no predetermined vocabulary for his malaise. Though Goncharov's traveler has metaphorically muddy boots, home in this discussion is not defined in physical terms, but as a state of being, as the unperceived harmony with one's surroundings, such that the at-home subject

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is not aware of home as a discrete or bounded entity. In this understanding, the figure of Oblomov abroad can consciously remember himself as having been "at home" in the past, but this is a state he cannot consciously experience in the present. To elaborate on this critical understanding of home as a state of being perceptible only in its absence, I draw from Lukacs's discussion of the formative role of memory in creating a recollected sense of unity between the interior world of the self and the exterior world, one that can only exist in the past. The memory of past harmony allows for the subject's belief in a potential "return home to itself," or for the reunification of a fractured internal and external world such that the individual will no longer be aware of any distinction between the two. 18 The spatial and temporal remove travel imposes on the subject affords the Oblomov-like narrator of Frigate Pallas a unique opportunity to restore the harmony of home to the self through recollection, by remembering himself as having been at home before the act of departure. This process extends to the national level as well. Oblomov abroad can recall himself as having been "at home" in his personal sphere and "at home" in Russia, while, ironically, it was precisely those harmonies the narrator claimed not to know before he left Russia, describing himself as an eternal traveler.

A Russian Barin as Seen from London The traveler who claims he cannot remove the soil of Oblomovka from his feet demonstrates his homesickness in a literal way: the memory of home distorts his vision of foreign surroundings. fu if to demonstrate just how profoundly home intrudes on the narrator's consciousness, a comparison of Russian and English national domesticities plays a central role in the London narrative of Frigate Pallas. The Oblomov-like narrator contrasts the home life of a typical English gentleman with that of a typical Russian barin, in the process critiquing English society and vividly remembering a heavily idealized version of life on a Russian estate that bears a close resemblance to Oblomovka. England-the place Goncharov has traveled to and should be experiencing through fresh eyes-is transformed into a foil for Russia: The modern Englishman does not have to wake up by himself, or worse, be waked up by a servant. That is [barbarism], being behind the times[ ... ]. He wakes up by an alarm clock. After washing himself by means of a little gadget, he puts on his clothes, which have been washed by steam; he sits down at the table, putting his feet into a fur-lined sack specially made for this purpose, and prepares for himself, again with the help of steam, beefsteak or a chop in three seconds, drinks his tea, and then

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As seen through Oblomov-like Russian eyes, the Englishman is an automaton engaged in an unending series of programmed activities from the moment of his awakening until his alcoholic slumber at night. This is a chilling portrait of an industrialized society, in which the people have become machines dependent on other machines. The Englishman's home life is notable for its utter lack of domesticity, or lack of the comforting human rituals usually associated with home life. Instead, his home is a space of gadgetry and isolation-there is no domestic hearth. Goncharov's critique of the English points to an Oblomov-like concern with the perceived spread of an all-consuming materialist culture of Western capitalism. 20 This culture is one that seems to preclude the patriarchal essence of Russian domestic life, the "organic" fusion between master, servants, and estate of which Oblomovka is the supreme literary example. The absence of family and of domestic servants in the Englishman's house is no trifling matter, but is deeply symptomatic: the Englishman does not occupy a place in a family of his own, there is no inner domestic realm to complement the national domestic sphere in which he resides. The absence of family retainers-servants, keepers of the familyfrom the English domestic sphere is a marker of extreme dysfunctionality for the Russian elite observer. Goncharov's treatment of the English here recalls some of the other authors considered in this book. Karamzin, Herzen, and Dostoevsky all criticize English society for what they perceive as its anti-domestic character. The depiction of English obsession with the mechanization and order of even the most humble aspects of domestic life leads to a direct comparison with its Russian equivalent. In an atypical move for a travel text, the Oblomov-like narrator brings the narrative to a halt and turns his gaze homeward for the space of several pages. In language that strongly recalls the transition in Oblomov from

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the scene in Oblomov's apartment in Saint Petersburg to his recollections of his childhood at Oblomovka in "Oblomov's Dream," the narrator loses himself in a vivid memory of the home life of a "typical" Russian barin 21 : An English fog, produced by steam and the smoke of hard coal, now hides this scene from me. Now the fog disperses and I see another picture. I see, far from here, in a large room, on three feather-beds, a man in deep sleep. With both his hands, and with his blanket, he has covered his head, but the flies have found some unguarded spots and descend in clumps on his cheeks and neck. The sleeping man is not concerned by this. There is no alarm clock in the room, but there is a grandfather clock[ ... ]. The country squire sleeps on; he does not wake up when Parashka, sent by his wife to wake him for tea, after calling him three times, gently gives the sleeper a push, with female but quite sturdy fists in his ribs; not even when the servant [... ] goes three times in and out, shaking the floorboards. And the sun bakes him [... ] and he still sleeps on. It is unknown when he would wake up by himself, perhaps when it is physically impossible to sleep anymore [... ]. He does wake up, because he has had a bad dream[ ... ] and suddenly a cock crows loudly beneath his window [... ] that living alarm clock[ ... ]. [The squire] is awake, he sits and wonders how he could have overslept [... ]. [He] scratches himself, sitting on his bed, one boot in hand, worrying about the other. But finally everything gets straightened out: the boot was dragged under the sofa by Mimishka last night[ ... ]. [Yegorka] would have got a good scolding, but he brought for dinner a whole basket of carps, a couple of hundred crabs, and had also made a fishpole for the little squire [... ]. 22

The description of the barin counters that of the Englishman point for point. There are several striking contrasts, among them the fact that the Russian barin's house is full of people: servants, family, even animals abound. The presence of domestics makes for the existence of a domestic sphere, unlike the solitary household of the English gentleman. The Russian house is a social microcosm that revolves around the center point of the barin, and it should be understood as an example of the Russian national family writ small. This domestic sphere is not mechanized, and unnecessary labor does not take place here. This is exemplified by the barin's powerful sleep: he sleeps as much as he needs to, until he is ready to wake up, unlike the artificially awakened Englishman. Time also operates differently on the Russian estate than it does in London. What for the Englishman was instantaneous-waking up-is for the Russian barin a drawn-out process. Moreover, the scene at the estate expands in the course of a few pages to include, not a day, as it does in London, but an entire year. Russian time is not measured in minutes or seconds, as the narrator claims it is in England, but by the long-term, cyclical passage of years and generations, by a

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grandfather clock (dedovskie chasy) rather than an alarm clock. The grandfather clock is an important symbol as it suggests patrimony, the cycle of generations, the nurturing presence of family, and inheritance. Its time is a passive, "fatherly'' force that resides in the background; the grandfather clock is part of the (inherited) furniture. The English alarm clock, on the other hand, suggests time at its most aggressive, acting directly on the individual, alarming and instrumentalizing him. It is associated with work and the factory whistle. Time at the estate, on the other hand, passes without undue attention and is not exploited in terms of efficiency and production; the grandfather clock is a machine, but one that is almost organic and can be ignored. In terms of the travelogue, the dynamic account of travel time (dates and schedules) is interrupted by the description of organic "home" time, cyclical and large in scale. This home time is not linear or progressive, and it is not historical in the sense of time that moves cumulatively from one point to the next or that can be quantified by dates and numbers. A,; Borowec has shown in regard to Oblomov, time at Oblomovka is ahistoric, even pre-historic, more akin to the mythological time of the classical past than to the industrial time of modern society. 23 Frigate Pallas makes the same claim about the Russian estate more generally, suggesting that the quintessential Russian barin does not inhabit the historical, progressive time of modern England, but rather exists in an ahistorical temporality. This opposition recalls Chaadaev's argument that Russia has been excluded from European history and historical time, as we saw in the Introduction and in Chapter 2. Strikingly, however, in Frigate Pallas this natural or organic time is portrayed in entirely positive terms and not as isolating and naive, as it is in Oblomov. Differing temporalities are but one means by which the realm of the English gentleman is distinguished from that of the Russian barin. The Russian estate described in the remainder of the passage is in a state of disarray, yet this disorder proves to be beneficial: the barin, lazy, blustering, and careless with his money, is generous to a fault (though he does not give to formal charities), and the inhabitants of his estate are appropriately cared for. The depiction of the Russian social system as lacking order, yet nurturing its members, serves as an implicit critique of the English system in which society may be well-ordered, but the industrialized poor are left to fend for themselves while their former masters are transformed into robotic clones. The lengthy description of the Russian barin and his estate included in the first section of Frigate Pallas plays an important role as a point of comparison for English society. It also establishes a definitive-if fantastical-picture of home that lies behind the entire travel text. This home encapsulates a Russian identity that is rooted in space, in its own idiosyncratic time, and in a traditional system of values and relationships linked to the Russian country estate. Ironically, this

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identity is more secure in the context of Frigate Pallas-or when seemingly viewed from abroad-than it is in Oblomov, where Oblomovka in the first part of the book is a dangerously enclosed world that degenerates from within. The depiction of the estate in Frigate Pallas is a powerful demonstration of the narrator's ability to recollect home, to utilize travel as a means of experiencing a state of domestic harmony through memory. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, or at least less critical, and the pose of distance in Frigate Pallas allows the narrator to indulge in a fantasy version of home and, at the same time, to construct a self-contained Russian universe. In Frigate Pallas, the troubling aspects of this feudal vision are overshadowed, if not replaced, by its function as an antidote to the market-based modernity of the world of the English. Whatever its weaknesses, the Oblomovkalike estate is a bastion of domesticity, a homey sphere that is tied to the natural world and a place in which human relations-if hierarchical-are at the center of things. Both the barin's domestic scene and the Englishman's are representative of their national milieus: England lacks a domestic heart(h) while Russia-in memory, at least-is all heart(h). The irony in Frigate Pallas, however, is that the narrator has created a positive image of Russian home, but this home is patently a fiction, generated as it is by a novel (Oblomov) and by the world of the rural gentry that is rapidly disappearing on the eve of Emancipation. Goncharov's critique of England calls to mind Dostoevsky's dismissive view of English society in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (as well as Herzen's depictions of the English as an "alien race"). Dostoevsky also posits Russia's difference from England as an effective counter to the ills of a modern industrial world, stressing Russian Christian communal brotherhood as the force that will redeem English (and European) alienation and fractured individualism. Dostoevsky is far more critical of the English, however, taking pains to portray the suffering urban poor in grim detail (e.g., public drunkenness, child prostitution) and giving voice for the first time to a view of industrial society as nothing more than an ant heap. It was his visit to the Crystal Palace while in London in 1863 that would later give rise to its famous appearance as a symbol of destructive modernity in Notes from the Underground. Since at least the time of Karamzin's Letters ofa Russian Traveler, however, the theme of English alienation and ennui has resonated strongly in Russian letters. When faced with the seeming horrors of English modernity, writers such as Dostoevsky and Goncharov, as well as Herzen, found the dilemmas of Russian identity to be, in contrast, at least temporarily resolved. Goncharov the eternal homeless traveler finds that home does exist in Russia, after all, even if only in fiction. Herzen and Dostoevsky find that Russian society offers an ideal of potential communality, even if it has not yet been realized. England proves to be the ultimate foil for Russia in these portrayals. Despite England's frequent association with the very origins of the

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idea of domesticity, these nomadic Russian writers discover that the opposite is true. English social ills are so extreme as to make Russia, in comparison, a bastion of pre- or anti-modern domesticity and inclusiveness. The idealized Russian version of home recollected in Frigate Pallas in response to English life leaves the Oblomov-like narrator in an awkward position. He cannot actually return to the place he claims to come from: it exists only in memory and can only be realized through the lens of distance from it. Fittingly, personal homecoming is not portrayed in Frigate Pallas. Rather, the narrative breaks off in Siberia, thousands of miles from Saint Petersburg. The travelogue ends with the narrator in Irkutsk, that is, in the midst of the Russian frontier, an uncanny space where aspects of the familiar world of Russian life intermingle with elements of a seemingly new, democratic, and egalitarian frontier society. 24 The notion of "home" in Russia, easy to dream of from abroad, is necessarily complicated in the imperial space of Siberia. The idyllic vision of Oblomovka that has informed the narrator's travels through Europe and the far East becomes deeply problematic for the traveling narrator once in Russia's own East. Is Siberia part of the emotional-psychological domain of homeland Russia? If home is best or only known from afar, is it possible to return to it? What are the complexities of envisioning home from near proximity? In particular, can there be any sort of homecoming or real act of return for the self-described "eternal traveler" who has claimed to have been already "away" in Russia before he set out on his journey? The unexpected return trip across Siberia provokes further crucial questions: how will the narrator recognize or represent return to home ground in Frigate Pallas? What constitutes home for this "eternal Russian traveler?"

Domesticating Siberia Goncharov's six-month journey across Siberia comprises the subject of the final section of Frigate Pallas. 25 Much about this section of the book, set on the soil of what is at once home for Goncharov and yet, at the same time, an unfamiliar and even a foreign space, has been overlooked or oversimplified by scholars. Goncharov's treatment of Siberia is complex and includes a nuanced consideration of the to poi of home and homeland that engages with a discourse of homelessness-at-home, or permanent travel. These issues are framed in Frigate Pallas in terms of the narrator's negotiation with the frontier, his encounter with a distinctively Russian provinciality, and his engagement with what might be termed the literary "domestic familiar," or well-known ethos of provincial Russia such as that found in Gogol's oeuvre. In Frigate Pallas, Siberia is written into an existing literary paradigm that describes heartland Russia; but in this paradigm

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the center-home-is impossible to find. Ironically, this implicit homelessnessat-home is the most familiar aspect of Russian life in Siberia. The last section of Frigate Pallas is set in Siberia because Goncharov's journey did not end as planned, due to the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854. Goncharov and his Russian companions were forced to leave Japan but could not sail back to Russia the way they had come via Africa and Europe, nor could they continue on to the United States, as they originally intended. Instead, they were taken to the coast of Siberia, where they disembarked at the mouth of the Amur River. From there, they made their way back to Saint Petersburg over land, a laborious process that took several months. For the Oblomov-like traveler, whose presence has been felt throughout Frigate Pallas, Siberia is a space that is at once home-like and undomestic, even anti-domestic. It is made familiar precisely by a reencounter with the problematic nature of home and domesticity in the Russian context. The ambiguous space of Siberia is configured in Frigate Pallas in a number of ways: as an imperial frontier, as the extension of an imagined Russian homeland, and, contrastingly, as the least 'homey" of Russian spaces, marked as it is by the absence of the estate system. The earlier concern in Frigate Pallas over an acute sense of the absence of home and homeland is again brought to the fore in the context of Russian expansion into Siberia, a space that occupied a varied role in Russian national-imperial consciousness, where it was viewed alternately as an extension of the homeland, as a frontier, and as a colony. 26 Importantly, as Tolz notes, Russians of the mid-nineteenth century did not draw a firm physical or psychological distinction between the nation and its imperial territories. Imperial expansion was conceived of as an organic expansion of the nation-state into seemingly empty, organically Russian, territory. 27 The tensions inherent in this situation are readily apparent in Goncharov's text, where the question of Siberia's place in Russian national space is very much at stake. What does the home-focused narrator of Frigate Pallas make of Siberia, a space that is both home and not home? How does passage across the Russian frontier challenge the traveler's sense of homecoming and of Russian national space? In the next section, I will examine the portrayal of Siberia as an uncanny domestic space that throws aspects of Russian identity into stark relief, especially the absence of home. What makes Siberia familiar to the traveling narrator is precisely the experience of not feeling at home in his native land. This homelessness-at-home is represented in the text in various ways, through encounters with "familiar" landscapes to an emphasis on recognizable relationships and well-known literary contexts associated with a discourse of homelessness-at-home. It is the encounter with this familiar unfamilial-ness that marks the narrator's return to Russia and to his status as an eternal Russian traveler. Scholars have portrayed Goncharov's representation of Siberia in Frigate

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Pallas as an example of Siberia "boosterism," or as a representation of the Russian frontier in glowing terms as a space of infinite promise for both settler and nation alike. Such a view was prevalent throughout Russian society in the 1850s. 28 Many of Goncharov's contemporaries viewed the region as a place where a classless, future-oriented, frontier society was emerging, a new social order that retained no trace of what might be defined as oblomovshchina, or the traditional practice in which the provincial landed aristocracy was supported by serf labor, and scholars have placed Goncharov in this category. While Goncharov's text does in part celebrate Siberia's newness and status as a frontier, the attitude toward Siberia as a whole is far more complex than that of simple boosterism. The traveling narrator both emphasizes and simultaneously undermines the qualities of newness/ frontieriority and inscribes "home"-through a familiar literary-cultural ethosinto the remote Eastern spaces. 29 This inscription is a process of domestication in which the space of the frontier becomes an extension of the Russian provinces, or "home ground," thousands of miles east of the Urals. The transformation of Siberia into provincial space is itself uncomfortable, however, as it leads to a "familiar" difficulty, that of defining or locating home and homeland in the Russian literary context. "Home" in Frigate Pallas turns out to be less a concrete territorial space than it is the imagined space in which one engages in a search for it. Not surprisingly, themes of frustrated return and problematic homecoming, highlighted through references to the Odyssey, Woe from W'it, Oblomov, and Dead Souls, frame the narrator's experience of Siberia. Issues of return are brought to the fore: home and homeland, easily imaginable while away, become troublingly difficult to locate upon return. Before looking closely at the Siberia narrative of Frigate Pallas, I will briefly consider the meaning of the terms home and homeland and consider the symbolic role of Siberia in nineteenth-century Russian national consciousness, important contexts to this discussion.

Home and Homeland The concepts of home and homeland are closely related. In the most essential sense, homeland may be understood as the idea of home writ large, made public and expanded to encompass a body of people greater than the family, yet circumscribed in familial terms (motherland, fatherland) and by shared cultural and historical experience. Home (dom in Russian) is the private realm to which an individual can be said to "belong," while homeland (rodina, otechestvo) is the public space in which the same individual feels a sense of inclusion. The term homeland can also be applied to a body of people who share an idea or vision

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of what "home" itself consists of, from family relationships and hierarchies to architecture, geography, and domestic habits. 30 In these terms, home and homeland are the private and public places where one understands the rules that govern familial and social interactions and to which one feels one belongs. In the Russian context, as in many others, homeland is a problematic concept. 31 A homeland is traditionally imagined as a fixed geographical and politico-social entity that lends concrete cultural, national, and often ethnic, definition to its members. Many key Russian thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries feared that Russia lacked developed national political and social traditions of its own and that Russians were culturally imitative of Western Europe. 32 This was complicated by Russia's status as an imperial state whose borders were expanding, entailing changes to its physical territory and necessitating the incorporation of ethnically non-Russian peoples into the empire. These factors contributed to a confusion over the definition of a Russian homeland, a confusion which persists in Russia even today. 33 In a context in which it is difficult to define homeland, home-understood as the private manifestation of homeland-also necessarily becomes difficult to locate. Ironically, however, as already noted, notions of home and homeland can acquire particular clarity in their absence, or through the perceiving subject's distance or departure from them. 34 As has been discussed earlier in this chapter, it is the homeless subject-the individual who left or was forced to leave-who can most clearly identify the contours of home and homeland from afar. The concern with the nature of Russian home and homeland in the Siberia narrative of Frigate Pallas connects it to a central emphasis in nineteenth-century Russian literature upon the personal and national search for home.

Siberia in the Russian Imagination The fact of Siberia complicates any discussion or definition of a Russian homeland. Part of imperial space, the remote eastern territory stretching to the Pacific Ocean did not come to be seen as also a part of national space until well into the nineteenth century. 35 From the seventeenth century on, Siberian geographical territory was conceived of as both Russia's "gold mine" of furs and other natural resources and as a space of prison and exile. 36 In the eighteenth century, Siberia was viewed as a lucrative economic possession at the service of the state, not as an extension of the Russian homeland. 37 As Bassin describes the perceptions of Russian space, "European Russia'' was understood to be the territory west of the Ural Mountains and "Asian Russia'' the territory to the east. Siberia was a colonial possession in this dichotomy. The exile of the Decembrists

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to the region during the Romantic period coincided with a change in this perception, however: the once bleak landscape came to be seen as powerful and sublime in the popular imagination, and as a space that belonged in cultural terms to Russia. 38 By the mid-1850s, Siberia was perceived as part of national space, but not necessarily as part of homeland space, in part because the limits of Russia's expansion were not fixed at that time. 39 Like England's nineteenth-century colonial possessions, Siberia was a distinct entity, but unlike other European colonies, Siberia's geographic contiguity meant it was also a space into which the nation itself could expand and develop, as with the American frontier. 40 Siberia's physical proximity placed it in a tenuous geopolitical position between the boundaries of nation and empire, home and foreign land. Add to this the fact that national and imperial boundaries, literal and otherwise, were not clearly defined in the mid-nineteenth century and Siberia's position in Russian national consciousness becomes complex indeed. The image of a frontier prompts certain associations, primarily a confrontation between civilization and nature, the process of history in the making, the seemingly infinite expansion of the frontier's outer limit, and social and political egalitarianism. 41 Arguably, there is a further element that completes any aesthetics of frontierority, and that is the uncanny, or the coexistence of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the integration of socio-cultural elements of an "old" world into a new physical and social space that distorts or displaces these familiar entities. 42 The importation of domestic life (farms, families) into the wilderness raises an important question as to the meaning of a frontier: does it represent the beginning of a new history or is it the extension of an extant national narrative in a new space? This is a tension central to any symbolic representation of a national frontier, and it is especially so in the case of Russia, where traditional notions of identity were not dominated by the idea of expansion in the way nineteenthcentury American identity frequently was. Rather, the image of the frontier in Russian national consciousness was viewed against or alongside the image of an extant homeland, which was understood to be bounded by the Urals and more or less defined by a traditional national culture. 4-' There is significant interplay in Frigate Pallas among competing discourses of Siberia that cast it as a brave new frontier, as a barren, desolate landscape peopled by primitive natives, and as a Russian provincial space. In contrast to his earlier criticism of English colonial practices in Africa and Asia, the narrator does, in part, adopt the tone of a Siberia "booster," championing the successes of the Russian settlers he encounters and supporting Russia's expanding presence in the area as triumphs of history and national achievement. He bemoans the emptiness and silence, and describes the readiness of the indigenous population

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for civilizing Russification. In Frigate Pallas, Russian presence is perceived as a boon for the region. The question of how the region is related to Russia and what it means in national terms is a different one, however, and will comprise the subject of the next sections.

"The Smoke of the Fatherland" The representation of Siberia in Frigate Pallas is colored by "provincialism," or an emphasis on a familiar world of the Russian provinces that is depicted in various literary examples, perhaps most prominently in Gogol's work. In Lounsbery's terminology, provincialism is a literary mode that encompasses both the place of the provinces in Russian identity and the role of the provinces as a symbol of Russia's perceived cultural backwardness (or provinciality) in relation to Western Europe. 44 The final portion of Frigate Pallas is in part written in this literary mode as a means of transforming the "wild" territory of the frontier into a space of banal familiarity. At the same time, however, this provincialism is accompanied by an unsettling association with familiar dilemmas of Russian identity, dilemmas which might be said to be encapsulated in the Russian domestic-both in the sense of native and home-focused-literary tradition. This occurs in a number of ways, from the narraror's taking note of familiar and home-like features of the landscape to, more importantly, the incorporation of the narrator's experience of Siberia into a lineage of problematic homecoming in Russian letters. In deliberate play with the monumentality of the frontier discourse, in which the narrator has explicitly engaged at other points in the section, Siberia is presented in counter terms as an extension of the Russian provincial, national countryside. Siberian Russian settlements look very much like Russian hometowns: "Thank goodness! Everything has begun to look like Russia: settlements and villages appear often[ ... ]. Crows and starlings fly by, roosters crow, little boys whistle and wave at the passing troika, and smoke rises in vertical columns from a multitude of chimneys-the smoke of the fatherland [dym otechestva]! These scenes of Rus' are familiar to everyone." 45 The vivid description in this passage differs sharply from the description of settlers as "nameless titans" forging a new nation and from the frequent reference to Siberia's dreary landscape and population of impoverished Yakuts. Both modes of representing Siberia characterize Frigate Pallas and have been noted by scholars such as Bassin and Krasnoshchekova. 46 On the surface at least, however, the villages the narrator encounters near Irkutsk look like home, despite their great distance from central Russia, and they are praised for their faithfulness to the original model. Far from stressing any reinvention of Russian

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identity, the use of the archaic word Rus' in this passage signifies the villages' resemblance to the most archetypal images of Russian life and to an idealized vision of a Russian "hometown" rooted in an ancient past.47 This archaic version of Russian identity is one inherently bound to a delimited geographical space, to the homeland itself, and seemingly not exportable across an expanding empire. As the description here shows, however, Rus' can be replicated, and the familiar can be written onto new surroundings. What is more, the Russian scene that is described is familiar to Russian readers, possibly from firsthand knowledge, but also from literary precedent. The word Rus' possesses a host of associations, but perhaps most immediately for readers in the 18 50s, it would call to mind Gogol's Dead Souls (1842). The narrator famously invokes Russia by this archaic name at the end of the novel as he compares the nation to a speeding troika. The satiric description of Chichikov's journey through the banal and petty spaces of the Russian provinces in Dead Souls is a key example of Lounsbery's literary provincialism. The use of the word Rus' in Goncharov's passage suggests tonguein-cheek play: these scenes are "familiar to everyone" because the Russian reader has read depictions of Russian village life elsewhere. The echo of Dead Souls and its sardonic portrait of provincial life suggests that Goncharov's village is not the bucolic idyll it seems to be. Indeed, there is more to this passage than meets the eye. The evocative phrase "smoke of the fatherland" in particular leads to a rich chain of subtextual association, one that links the narrator's passage across Siberia to texts that are specifically concerned, as is Dead Souls, with frustrated homecoming. In Act I of Griboedov's 1823 play Woe from Wit, the protagonist Chatskii ironically uses a version of the phrase to express his disappointment on his return to Russia after a three-year journey abroad: "I shall be sick of [the Russians], but where is there perfection?/ When we have wandered far, and come back home again, / 'Our country's very smoke inspires a sweet delection"' (28). Chatskii's remark, in turn, paraphrases a line from a well-known 1798 Derzhavin poem, "The Harp" ("Arfa'): "Even the smoke of the fatherland is sweet and pleasant to us." 48 The line in Derzhavin's poem and elsewhere recalls the Latin phrase fomus patriae dulcis, commonly attributed to the Roman poet of exile, Ovid, and well known in Russian literature at the turn of the nineteenth century. The phrase has a deeper history, however: the line in Ovid's verse is a reference to Athena's description of Odysseus's homesick longing to see the smoke from the chimneys oflthaca once more in the fast pages of the Odyssey. 49 The layered history of this phrase is suggestive, both in terms of the issue of Siberia's inclusion in national space, and in relation to the question of whether Russian home exists there. While the line outwardly asserts that this Siberian Russian town is an outpost of the fatherland, the phrase itself is tied expressly to Russian texts that describe an alienated longing for home rather than the joy

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of actual return. Most immediately, Griboedov's satiric play attacking Russian Gallomania, Woe from Wit, is centered around Chatskii's return to Moscow from an extended absence abroad. His homecoming is marred by the discovery that his childhood love Sofya has not remained constant in her affections during his absence. Chatskii's return to his homeland (Russia) and his home (Moscow, Sofya) is foiled, and he is on the road again at the end of the play, excluded from both the national and the domestic spheres by his disappointment and alienation. Woe from Wit may be read as an anti-Odyssry: the wandering hero returns, but his Penelope has rejected him in favor of an inferior suitor, dooming him to a life of eternal wandering. 50 Derzhavin's "The Harp" is not a satire, but, rather, an elegiac poem. It is, however, similarly concerned with the theme of impossible homecoming. The nostalgic poem recalls the poet's childhood home in Kazan, and the city is described both as the "cradle of [his] earliest days" and as the poet's motherand fatherland (rodina, otechestvo). Childhood home and native land are synonymous in the poet's memory. The provincial capital Kazan as represented in the poem stands for a quintessential Russia, the Russia of one's childhood, understood from the adult perspective as the time and place where one existed in a state of harmony, where there was no division between the inner circle of one's family and the outer circle of the nation or homeland. In "The Harp," the adult poet mourns the loss of both spheres. "Home" in the poem is a state of recollected harmony and belonging; the mature, Petersburg protagonist cannot re-access this distant point in space and time. While Griboedov's play and Oerzhavin's poem are quite different in terms of genre-one is a satiric drama and the other an elegiac eighteenth-century poem-they are powerfully linked by the way in which home and homeland are conceived as overlapping, if not enmeshed, entities. In both, the lack of a domestic center corresponds to an exclusion from the larger "center" of the national family. Moreover, the deeper references to Ovid's verse and to the Odyssry place all three Russian texts in a classical context of exile. Russian homesick longing is elevated to the level of epic emotion. In Tristia, the very real historical figure Ovid mourns his exile from Rome and, importantly, also from his wife; in the process he borrows a formula from the ancient Greek epic of wandering and frustrated return. The fictional Odysseus is the Western archetype of a homeless wanderer: in modern interpretations he yearns to return not only to his wife and son, but also to his rightful place at the center of his universe on Ithaca. As the examples of Ovid the actual exile and Odysseus the archetype reveal, absence from home is twofold, entailing removal from the personal sphere and from the larger community. This formula is striking because it demonstrates an unexpected parallel to the interpretation of the stages theory of history discussed in the

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Introduction. Just as Chaadaev's Letter in effect applies the logic of the stages theory-if Russia is not civilized and not part of European history, then it must figuratively belong to an earlier stage, that of the pastoral-nomadic-so too the literary concern with homelessness serves as such an application. If there is no clearly defined Russian nation or homeland, then Russians must be, in individual terms, homeless. The presence of the intertextual references to Griboedov, Derzhavin, Ovid, and Homer detailed above serves an additional purpose in the narrative. Allusions to familiar works of Russian literature and to classical works of special pertinence and popularity in the Russian context mark the area around Irkutsk as literary terra cognita, even if what they describe is terra in.firma. The frontier village Goncharov sights near Irkutsk has succeeded not only in recreating Russian architecture, but in reestablishing the matrix of Russian literary-cultural life as well, at least for the narrator of Frigate Pallas. Yet this literary grounding is itself uncertain terrain: the protagonists Chatskii and Chichikov are eternal travelers, superfluous men, who lack a place, both in a home of their own and at the national domestic hearth. It is, in fact, this complicated relationship to the "smoke of the fatherland"-not the smoke itself-that is what is most familiar about the "Russian towns" Goncharov encounters. To return to the original passage, however, the towns and villages outside Irkutsk that the narrator describes as "familiar to everybody," are not, after all, exact replicas of home life in Russia. One element of traditional Russian life is not to be found there, as the narrator comments in the next line: "All that is missing is the manor house, the servant opening the gates, and the sleepy barin in the window.... This has never existed in Siberia and the absence of this-that is, any traces of the institution of serfdom-comprises the most notable feature of Siberia's physiognomy." 51 The absence of serfdom in Siberia frequently attracted travelers' attention and was commented upon regularly in other texts about the region. Most nineteenth-century Russian observers viewed the absence of serfdom as one of Siberia's most prominent and positive socio-political characteristics. 52 While scholars have cited this passage as strong evidence of Goncharov's negative view of serfdom, it is important to note that this is the only comment on the subject in several hundred pages of text, and it is, at best, a veiled and ambiguous one. Despite the pressures of state censorship that would have precluded any critical discussion of the institution of serfdom in a work such as Frigate Pallas, it is clear that the central concern of the passage is not freedom from a reviled practice, but emphasis on the absence of home in this quasi-Russian space. Specifically, it is the familiar triumvirate of manor house, servant, and sleepy barin that cannot be found in the Siberian hometown; in short, there is no Oblomovka there. As the ellipsis

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suggests, the narrator takes an ambivalent view toward the juxtaposition made here between the absence of the formal "institution of serfdom" and the brief but endearing glimpse of the sleepy barin in the window who seems to represent Russian life at its most homey, if also its most feudal. The sleepy barin and the "institution of serfdom" are not quite equivalents for the narrator, the more so as the image of the barin vividly recalls the earlier passage in Frigate Pallas in which a barin was contrasted with an English gentleman in striking terms. As we saw earlier, English domestic life is portrayed in Frigate Pallas as automatized to the point of imbecility: the Englishman does not even possess thoughts of his own, only information gained from newspapers. The barin, in contrast, lives at the center of a sleepy, disorganized, but overflowingly generous and organic domestic world that does not pretend at newspaper knowledge of the outside world. It is a world that very much resembles Oblomovka. This domestic realm of the Russian estate has earlier served as an important critique of British industrialized capitalism and as a glorified picture of a Russian national demesne. "Homeyness" is precisely what industrialized England no longer offers its citizens, and cannot offer its colonial subjects. 53 It is difficult to construe the absence of this distinctly Russian version of home life in Siberia as an entirely positive feature in the context of Frigate Pallas. Rather, the passage suggests that home itself, for the Oblomov-like narrator at least, is not present in Siberia, despite the presence of villages that look like home and that recall a familiar literary concern with problematic homecoming. For the Oblomov-like narrator who cannot wash the soil of Oblomovka off his feet, even the seemingly most Russian town will not replace the home he has nostalgically imagined returning to. Even as many other aspects of Russian life are present, the absence of the estate would seem to mark Siberia as an essentially foreign or unhomely space, rendering those aspects of familiar domesticity the narrator discovers there uncanny: they are a simulacrum of the real thing, a recreation of Russian domesticity, but one that lacks the tight-knit patriarchy that should be found at its core. To complicate the matter, however, the "home" that is lacking in Siberia is not to be found in homeland Russia either. The quintessential image of the sleepy barin and the servant opening the gates to the ancestral estate is itself a fictional one, an invention of Goncharov the author and a way of life that no longer exists for Oblomov in the novel, if, indeed, anything like it ever really existed at all. Paradoxically, this passage suggests that the narrator's reawakened sense that home is absent is what marks his return to home territory, meaning that Siberia is familiar in its very un-familial-ness, or in the narrator's experience of homelessness-at-home.

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An Unlikely Odysseus The Odyssey forms an important, if ironic, subtext to Frigate Pallas; indeed, the figure of Oblomov abroad could hardly fail to find resonance in Odysseus's fabled longing for home. As Adams has shown, the Odyssey serves as a crucial, if parodic, reference point in Oblomov, both in terms of Oblomov's homeless plight and in the structure of the narrative itself. 54 The Odyssey's classic tale of frustrated return occupied an important role in early to mid-nineteenth century Russian letters, where it helped to articulate the plight of the contemporary educated "homeless" Russian elite. 55 The many references to the ancient epic poem in Frigate Pallas privilege the themes of return and the homeward journey. These references are most pronounced in the Siberian portions of the narrative, a region Goncharov refers to as a vast Ithaca: "But it was eight thousand miles yet from here to the red roof where I could cry out: 'Home!' What a vast Ithaca lay between our Odysseus[es] and the arms of [their] Penelope[s]." 56 While the ironic tone appears to underplay the seriousness of Goncharov's travails, the comparison between Odysseus and the Oblomov-like narrator is still telling: the narrator of Frigate Pallas undertook his voyage for the service of his country, to some degree unwillingly, and was throughout a homeward-looking, if not homeward-bound, traveler. The semblance ends there, however, for in a traditional, if flawed, understanding of the classical world, the Odyssey is a story with an end. Odysseus was understood to eventually return home and be reintegrated, if violently, into his former place as husband, father, son, and king. In their study of the ties between the classical epic and the Russian novel, Griffiths and Rabinowitz point to the conventional understanding of the world of the epic as closed and harmonious.57 The Odyssey in particular was read in nineteenth-century Russia in terms of closure and completion, despite the fact that Odysseus's homecoming is incomplete: he returns to Ithaca, but on condition that he travel on to make a sacrifice to Poseidon after reestablishing his rule. Further, his death is foretold as coming from the sea, suggesting more travel to come. Goncharov, like his contemporaries, viewed the classical world as a reference point by which to measure the contemporary human condition: the return that Odysseus completes is no longer possible for nineteenth-century Russians. Oblomov abroad certainly cannot accomplish full return: Oblomovka, though a static space in many ways, is not, it turns out, rooted to the spot in the way that Odysseus's home on Ithaca is. Rather, the self-enclosed world has ceased to exist in the hero's absence. More pragmatically, the narrative of Frigate Pallas does not see the narrator home again, or even across the Urals and into Russian homeland space. Reference to the Odyssey in the Siberia portion highlights a perceived rupture between the

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seemingly golden age of the classical epic, where true return was possible, and the modern age in which travel is a permanent ailment. 58 I would briefly note here the deep ties between Oblomov and Dead Souls, a novel that is engaged in a profound subtextual dialogue with the Odyssey. The protagonist of Dead Souls, Chichikov, is, in many ways, the antithesis of Oblomov: Chichikov is a confidence man, not the victim of a scheme, and a traveler who makes his away around provincial Russia, unlike the stay-at-home Oblomov. 59 The motivation behind Chichikov's scheme is, however, a domestic one: he purchases the names of dead serfs as a means of establishing a veneer of respectability so as to buy a home and a place for himself in Russian society. Of course, any attempt to find a home through such crooked means is doomed to failure, and Chichikov, like so many other Russian heroes-Chatskii, Onegin, Pechorin-is last seen on the road to somewhere else. Just as Oblomov is meant to be a Russian type, Chichikov is meant to reveal something about Russian society. He is intrinsically homeless, in part because he was sent away from home at an early age by his unloving and miserly father, and in part because he is himself incapable of any real feeling or attachment to people or places. He is an itinerant bureaucrat who is by nature out to game the system, and thus can never be invested in the system in a sincere way. Oblomov the victim and Chichikov the victimizer represent the opposite ends of a mutually reinforcing system that only succeeds because both actors are internally displaced and not accounted for by homes, families, or national settings. Dead Souls posits a rather chilling version of the Russian nomadic wanderer, stripped of his Romantic raiment: this is not the evil of Pechorin, the frustration and suffering of Aleko or Onegin, or the search for salvation in Russian difference as developed by Dostoevsky and Herzen; rather, Chichikov represents the banal evil of a petty clerk with no emotional, or even physical, ties to the world around him. Strikingly, at the end of Gogol's novel, Chichikov's corrupt quest and his spiritual homelessness are transformed into an image of freedom and potential in the concluding passage. Chichikov and his carriage become a speeding troika that represents a dynamic Russia, flying past all other nations and toward a bright future. Oblomov, on the other hand, ends with the protagonist reaching the end of the road-death-and with his disappearance from social memory. The end of Dead Souls is worthy of note here, as it is, perhaps, the germ of an important later feature of the discourse of nomadic wandering as elaborated in the work of Dostoevsky, Herzen, and even Blok: the itinerant homelessness of the nation's subjects can become, in positive terms, the source of tremendous forward national movement. The fact of Gogol's difficulties in writing the two other planned books of the trilogy, however, suggests that conceiving of this transformation in real terms proved difficult to carry out, at least in the 1840s.

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A House on Wheels: Oblomov on the Domestic Road The encounter with aspects of Russian domestic life in Siberia is an important feature of the final section of Frigate Pallas, and one that offers insight into the tension between stasis and movement that characterizes the figure of Oblomov abroad in the travel text. Travel at home-that is, seeing home through travelis, as Bakhtin notes, the very essence of travel itself. He suggests that an essential feature of the chronotope of the road is precisely that "the road is always one that passes through familiar territory, and not through some exotic alien world [... ;] it is the sociohistorical heterogeneity of one's own country that is revealed and depicted." 6°Certainly travel as a means by which to view one's own land lies at the heart of the figure of Oblomov abroad: he is, after all, a traveler who sees abroad as refracted through the memory of home and who himself embodies aspects of Russian identity that unmistakably color his experience abroad. In Oblomov's case, however, there is a further dimension to his home-focused travels, and that is how he travels: as a homebody on the road, he enacts domesticity even in a state of movement. A hint of this is provided in Goncharov's early letter, discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Written in the voice of Oblomov, the letter describes what travel is like for a Russian who bemoans the fact that leaving his native land will mean fending for himself without his familiar valet. 61 Points in Frigate Pallas where the narrator comments directly on the nature of travel itself are thus of special interest. Throughout, he has taken pains to portray the difficulties of the journey, but, as he crosses the home ground of Siberia, he adopts a new tone, in which he waxes poetic about the charm of the open road: There are many who like the road, not as travel-that is, the observation of customs, change of place, and so on-but simply as road[ ... ]. It's glorious, these lovers of the road say, when, all frozen and covered with hoarfrost, you tumble into a warm hut, filling it[ ... ] with cold[ ... ]. 'Missus, the samovar!'[ ... ] [T]hefamiliarfood hamper appears on the scene, teacups come clattering down, the steam begins to rise in a fragrant stream from a small teapot, the fire begins to crackle in the stove, there's a furious spluttering from the melted butter in the pan, and vodka, caviar, and plates, etc. are already out on the table. 62 Notably, this is the first and only such paean to the joys of travel in the entire text of Frigate Pallas. Moreover, it is not just any road that is so appealing, but the Russian road. As the wealth of domestic detail suggests, it is travel in Russiatravel at home-that the narrator finds enjoyable. What the narrator appears to enjoy, however, is not so much travel itself as it is stopping at the side of the road. Stopping on the Russian road is a set piece in miniature; there is a comforting

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sameness to the roadside inns that marks them as Russian. Russian domestic travel is enacted in the instantaneous creation of a home-like and familiar atmosphere, complete with timeless markers of national domesticity such as the samovar, vodka, and caviar. This passage purports to describe the joys of the open road, but in fact it describes the opposite: the joys of temporary habitation, of creating a momentary dwelling space to combat the strains of movement. Such an activity proves to be possible only on the road that passes through home territory. These moments of home-away-from-home are a fitting emphasis for the Oblomov-like narrator as they provide an opportunity to continually enact domesticity and re-experience the familiar. Ironically, this passage recalls the exuberance of Gogol's paean to the Russian road in Dead Souls: 'What a strange, and alluring, and transporting, and wonderful feeling is in the word: road! And how wondrous is this road itself: the bright day, the autumn leaves, the chill air. .. " (226). Where Gogol's passage develops a sense of movement, of motion itself, Goncharov parodically emphasizes the opposite, the cessation of travel, but in so doing, he domesticates the Russian road. The domesticated road-or travel brought down to a familiar, familial scaleis an important theme in the Siberia section. What makes "Russian travel" a national pastime is its very domesticity; it is defined differently from European travel. In fact, it is only in Russia's "far corners," i.e., Siberia, that true "domestic travel," as Oblomov would define it, is possible: 'The world is small, but Russia is big,' says one of my fellow travelers [... ]. That's true. Meanwhile you arrive in Berlin from Russia, and straight away you are promoted to the rank of traveler; while here you travel over an area three times the size of Europe and, all the same, you are just passing through. In Russia there are no travelers, just passers-through, never mind the fact that now the opposite should be true. Is it really possible to travel by railroad? Trains were invented with the express purpose of passing through spaces without noticing them. Now I see that only here, in these far corners, is it still possible to travel in the old, diverting sense of the word, with deprivations and difficulties, with just under a year's worth of provisions, with featherbeds and samovars. 63

In an ironic twist, Siberia becomes a space of domestic travel because it is only here, where there are as yet no trains, that one can experience travel at the proper speed of a pre-modern temporality. Such a journey, laden with featherbeds, food, and samovars is little different than traveling by means of a mobile home. Train travel, on the other hand, is understood to disconnect the traveler from the proper measurement of time and space and to blind him to the most important aspect of travel in the narrator's view: the suffering caused by leaving the comforts

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of home. 64 The train traveler is no longer painfully aware of the deprivations and difficulties engendered by departing from home, and no longer engages in the attempt to recreate home on the road, but, rather, passes through spaces quickly, with little or no sense ofloss or separation. The train traveler becomes a passerby, cut loose from his domestic sphere and therefore not attached to anything. The train has made traveling as a homebody obsolete in Western Europe, but in Russia's "far corners," real travel-movement slowed almost to the point of stasis-can still be carried out. Ironically, in this vast space where one is not yet doomed to "passing through" on a train, the narrator complains that credit for real travel is not given where it is due: "there are no travelers" in Russia, just "passers-through." While any Russian who travels as far as Berlin is a traveler because he has crossed an international border, anyone who traverses the enormous distances of Siberia fails to earn the same distinction since he has not crossed a boundary or reached a specific destination. This passage is suggestive in terms of recalling the perception of Russian space as lacking definition or placeness (in the vein of Chaadaev), and as failing to offer either a point of origin or a point of destination. A nation that primarily consists of space to pass through is, necessarily, peopled only by passers-through. The Oblomov-like musings on the perils of train travel call to mind Dostoevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions in an unexpected way. Dostoevsky's travel-sick narrator complains that for the Russian elite, there is no longer any observable physical or cultural border between Saint Petersburg and Berlin; the two cities and, in fact, the two cultures, have become indistinguishable, thus rendering the geopolitical border invisible or obsolete. To complicate matters, there is a Russian border, but it is in the wrong place, between the Russian elite and the narod, or, as the narrator refers to it, between "European Russia" and "Russian Russia," rather than between Russia and Europe. The train is held to be partly responsible, both for the traveling narrator's illness and for the problematic erasure of the border between Europe and Russia, and especially for the collapse of space and time to the point where there appears to be no distance between two points on the traveler's itinerary. Meanwhile, an unbridgeable divide between the Russian cultural elite, who travel internationally by train, and the pre-modern narod, who do not travel around Europe or on trains, has been created. 65 In a Dostoevskian vein, the passage in Frigate Pallas suggests that Siberia is more genuinely Russian than European Russia, which is here defined as that part of Russia served by the railroad. It is only in the "far corners" of Siberia that the true, traditional Russia, the non-European Russia, can be found. Curiously, the frontier has been transformed into the rear guard here in its fashioning as an anti-modern space where traditional culture is preserved, despite the lack of Oblomovka

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(and serfdom) in Siberian territory. 66 The absence of the railroad protects Siberian Russia's uniqueness-it certainly cannot be confused with Berlin, even if Saint Petersburg might be. Goncharov added this passage to the 1879 revised edition of Frigate Pallas, a fact that suggests it is a deliberate reference to Dostoevsky's 1863 critique of train travel in his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. For Goncharov, uniqueness is a necessary quality of home: without it he would not know he was there. This is also true of a homeland: it ceases to exist the moment it too closely resembles somewhere else. Siberia in this case has become the preserve of Russian uniqueness, even when this uniqueness is defined as an Oblomov-like pre-modern-or anti-modern-experience. Goncharov's Siberia is a space in which the most traditional version of Russian home is lacking, but this lack is, paradoxically, itself a marker of a familiar Russian literary-cultural discourse in which Russian travelers face problematic homecomings because they lack a domestic point of origin. Conversely, Siberia is also a space where traditional Russian culture is preserved, even while such traditional national culture vanishes from the capitals of European Russia. 67 Frigate Pallas can be read, in part, as a narrative of Russian wandering, a distinctly modern Russian Odyssey in which Oblomovka's status as an elusive point of origin and return makes a fitting replacement for the mythical island of Ithaca. It is hardly surprising that the narrative of Frigate Pallas breaks off in Irkutsk and that the traveler's final return to Saint Petersburg is not portrayed. Rather, he remains eternally homeward bound, a traveling writer engaged with the imagined community of a familiar and familial Russian literature, one peopled by homeless wanderers and travelers like Chichikov and Chatskii. Like any who "lack a domestic hearth," the figure of Oblomov abroad remains an eternal traveler looking for home.

Postscript: "Strangers in Our Families" To return to where we began in this chapter, the question of how Oblomovabroad or at home-is linked to a discourse of nomadic Russian wandering deserves further consideration. The character of Oblomov in the novel is an embodied paradox: he is a spiritually homeless stay-at-home, a Russian domosed who cannot leave the couch in his apartment, but who is nonetheless suspended in a permanent state of psychological "awayness," unable to find a proper home with friends and family or a fitting place in society. In seemingly unlikely ways, the fate of Oblomov in the novel exemplifies the terms of Chaadaev's critique of Russian society: he is a figurative nomad, detached from his familial, ancestral origins. He resides in various temporary lodgings in Saint Petersburg with no

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real attachment to place or people, other than to his servant Zakhar, a living relic of the bygone days at Oblomovka. Like Chaadaev's Russians, Oblomov "passes through," or lives at way stations. Oblomov's last stop at the humble abode of Agafya Matveevna Pshenitsyna is a fitting final resting place for such an eternal traveler. It is by nature an inbetween place, a way station located on the suburban border of Saint Petersburg between the city and the country, the capital and the provinces, as well as between the gentry and the working classes. Oblomov has been duped into living there and tricked into owing money by unscrupulous acquaintances; in other words, this "home" was not chosen by him, nor was it a particularly logical outcome. He has, of course, been seduced by the wifely/ motherly charms of the poor widow Agafya Matveevna, Russian housekeeper extraordinaire. Oblomov finds a domestic hearth at last, but it is a poor imitation, a parody even, of the one he was supposed to have made for himself, the family life he dreamt of aloud to Stolz earlier in the novel. That imagined domestic scene was of a happy, prosperous gentry family at home on their estate and at the center of a patriarchal world. Oblomov's family is, in the end, an accidental one: they are beneath his social station and he is essentially a stranger in their midst, a former tenant they have taken in and whom Agafya Matveevna primarily nurtures with food rather than emotional or psychological sustenance. Oblomov is not the lord and master, but a lodger who has become a permanent addition. Chaadaev's description of Russians as "strangers in their families" proves to be an apt moniker for the character of Oblomov, buried alive in suburbanprovincial anonymity. In the novel, Oblomov represents the old guard of the rural Russian gentry, mired in a world of traditional and conservative values that no longer mesh with the modernizing society around them. Oblomov is caught between these two worlds throughout the book, and he symbolically dies at the border between them, on the city's edge. This suburb is a non-space, a no-man's-land between the traditional, self-contained world of the Russian country estate and the bustle of the capital city, and Oblomov's death there is one en route, so to speak, half turned back toward the vanished world of Oblomovka and half toward the urban, modern world of Saint Petersburg. Oblomov dies in the bosom of a family, but it is, by most measures, the wrong family, and his death is caused by a literal excess of domesticity that he consumes without putting in much effort in return-he eats and sleeps himself to death. While this picture of fatal stagnation would seem to be the opposite of the restless motion described in Chaadaev's Letter, the conditions are similar. Chaadaev's Letter depicts a stagnation that is the result of ineffective, rootless Russian motion: "We live only in the most narrow kind of present ... in the midst of a shallow calm [stagnation/ zastoi] ." 68 This restless stagnation provides

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a distinct subtext to Oblomov's unstable, futile life within the environs of Saint Petersburg. A Russian nomadic wanderer, Oblomov has been severed from his point of origin and remains excluded from a modern, historically progressive temporality. Like the class he represents, he is permanently "on the road" in metaphysical terms. Whether Oblomov travels to England, Siberia, or the environs of Saint Petersburg, he remains a homeless wayfarer for whom home is a constant, yet elusive dream.

CHAPTER

FIVE

A Radical at Large Alexander Herzen and the Autobiography of a Russian Wanderer

In the month ofJuly, 1834, I finished the student years of my life and began my years of wandering. -Alexander Herzen He became in fact what in spirit he had been since the great trek from Moscow in January 1847-a wanderer on the face of the earth. -E. H. Carr The Bedouin has his own soil, his own tent, he has his own way of life .... The Russian is poorer than the Bedouin ... he has nothing with which he might be reconciled, which would comfort him. Perhaps the germ of his revolutionary calling lies here. -Alexander Herzen

Prevented by his liberal political views and critical attitude toward the government from being "at home" in the repressive Russia of Nicholas I, the noted Russian Socialist thinker and writer Alexander Herzen spent most of his adult life abroad. From 1847 until his death twenty-three years later, he moved

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between Switzerland, France, Italy, and England without making a permanent home in any country. Although he lived in London for the longest period (1852-1865), England never acquired the status of home: Herzen famously described the English as an "alien race," and he and various family members lived in fifteen different houses in and around London during the twelve years he spent there. 1 Given the unusually peripatetic nature of Herzen's adult life, it is hardly surprising that his great autobiographical work My Past and Thoughts (Byloe i dumy, 1852-1867) reflects the itinerancy of his life as a Russian exile in midnineteenth century Europe. Herzen's identification as a Russian wanderer and his engagement with the complex discourse of nomadic Russian wandering is, however, a crucial, yet underexplored, component of his literary legacy, and it is one that plays a central role in My Past and Thoughts. Herzen's life encompassed both internal exile and voluntary exile to the West; in part because of this, he has been received as a representative, even emblematic, figure for the generation of rootless, radicalized Russian intellectuals of the 1830s and 40s, men and women who were defined by their opposition to tsarist autocracy and by their disaffection, or disinheritance, from the Russian state. This disaffection was played out in terms of real and symbolic displacement, topoi of the nineteenthcentury Russian intelligentsia experience that were given voice perhaps most strikingly in My Past and Thoughts. In this chapter, I examine the centrality of the metaphor of nomadic wandering to My Past and Thoughts and consider how the discourse of Russian nomadism is developed in new and powerful ways in this text and elsewhere in Herzen's work. As this chapter will show, "Herzen," the central character of My Past and Thoughts, embodies the image of a homeless and rootless Russian wanderer, driven astray by the politically restrictive and culturally alienating forces of his own society in a special way. The essentially Romantic interpretation of Russian national identity as nomadic, key to the work of Pushkin, Chaadaev, Goncharov, and Dostoevsky, forms the organizing principle of Herzen's explicit self-presentation in My Past and Thoughts as a radical wanderer. This principle shapes the text on a structural level, where it forms the basis for meta-concerns with the character of memory and consciousness as themselves phenomena of indeterminacy and digression, and with the question of the nature of history and history's trajectory. On the narrative level, motifs of wandering, homelessness, travel, and exile are manifested in Herzen's portrayal of his family circumstances and in the representation of his life as a series of journeys. Yet, in an important divergence from the authors discussed in earlier chapters, the discourse of Russian nomadism in Herzen's work is significantly redirected. Russians' perceived lack of history and of attachment to national space is now configured as the source

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of political radicalism and revolutionary potential, rather than as the markers of profound lacunae in the Russian national psyche. In My Past and Thoughts and other key texts, notably From the Other Shore (1850) and Letters from France and Italy (1852), the image of an eternal Russian wanderer or nomad comes to embody, in positive terms, the notions of change, upheaval, and the destruction of an ossified European order. Less simply, it is also linked to the complex discussion of the nature of history that lies at the heart of much of Herzen's writing. This discursive turn would prove to have enormous significance in the sphere of Russian arts and letters in the years leading up to 1917. How do the topoi of travel, wandering, and nomadism shape the presentation of Herzen's life in My Past and Thoughts, a text that is not conventionally associated with such ideas? In what way is the discourse of Russian nomadic wandering developed in Herzen's autobiography-and what is its relationship to history, both personal and general? In the following sections, I will look closely at the relationship between writing, the self, and history in Herzen's work and will consider My Past and Thoughts as a consciously constructed personal history of itinerancy, in which this itinerancy is played out on both thematic and formal levels. In so doing, I will specifically examine the legacy of disinheritance that Herzen claims for himself, how the image of Chaadaev as a model political actor is formed in My Past and Thoughts, and the emphasis on emigration as a traumatic severance that completes Herzen's transformation into a very real wanderer-exile. I will conclude with a consideration of Herzen's critique of "Russian Europe," the imagined homeland of a culturally colonized Russian elite, a critique that very closely foreshadows Dostoevsky's 1863 attack on Russians abroad in Wznter

Notes on Summer Impressions.

Writing as History In Herzen's work, Russians' perceived lack of attachment to place and time is reconfigured as a freedom from history and as an absence that allows for the initiation of "true" historical progress toward Socialism, a progress no longer possible in the history-burdened world of Western Europe. 2 Such a positive interpretation of Russia's seeming lack of historical presence is not unique to Herzen, of course: Chaadaev had voiced a similar idea in his Apology of a Madman (1837) and in the other Philosophical Letters (1829-1831). Russia could be conceived of as a "blank slate" with the potential for a great role on the world-historical stage. 3 In Herzen's work, however, the discourse in which Russian identity is associated with nomadism, wandering, and travel acquires an explicitly radical or revolutionary cast, denoting less alienation or exclusion from

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the West than the possibility of creating a new world order. 4 In this, Herzen's work in some ways prefigures the theoretical stance of the late twentieth-century theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who posit "nomadism" (understood in the most figurative sense) as a form of non-participation in, even resistance to, the monolithic power structures of the modern, sedentary nation-state. 5 In Herzen's memoir, wandering acquires an increasingly positive meaning as a pure form of movement, or movement in its most anarchic and disordered sense. This movement is championed as uniquely Russian, and it is contrasted with the perceived stagnation and immobility of the bourgeois West. While the nature of Herzen's anti-bourgeois critique ofWestern Europe is well known, the role of the discourse of Russian nomadism in the formation of this critique has not been recognized. The topos of nomadic wandering reflects the author's peripatetic life as a Russian political radical of the mid-nineteenth century, and it articulates Herzen's concern as a writer, thinker, and political activist (if not the professional revolutionary Soviet scholars made him out to be) with the nature of Russian identity and Russian history itself It also defines the meta-literary preoccupation with writing personal memoir as a historical act in My Past and Thoughts. Written in the form of a memoir, My Past and Thoughts is, in fact, an extrageneric literary portrayal of Herzen's life and times, recounted as events of universal historical significance. fu eminent Herzen scholars such as Ginzburg and Malia have shown, Herzen viewed himself as a figure of historical importance and consciously considered the events and experiences of his own life, from earliest childhood, to be representative of those of his generation and its historical moment. 6 Indeed, the image of Herzen as a historical figure continues to occupy a special place in Russian cultural consciousness.7 My Past and Thoughts is intended as much as a memoir ofHerzen's life as it is meant to be a narrative representation of the historical process itself. As some scholars have argued, Herzen-in a radical move away from the reigning Hegelian historical paradigm-philosophically rejected the notion of historical progression, and the accompanying conception of the fixed national historical path, after the failure of the 1848 revolutions. 8 Instead, they argue, he embraced an anti-teleological view wherein history might be conceived in what I would call nomadic terms; that is to say, it was understood to move randomly, not progressively or developmentally. Whether Herzen's rejection of historical teleology fully defines his mature philosophy of history, however, is a matter of long-standing debate. Malia maintains that Herzen ultimately did not abandon his essentially teleological and progress-oriented model of history, despite an apparent move away from these views at a time in which intense personal tragedy corresponded with his bitter disappointment in the political events of 1848. 9 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to resolve this debate; rather, I would argue that the vision

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of human life and personal history presented in literary terms in My Past and lhoughts emphasizes non-teleological movement through time and highlights the vicissitudes of memory and subjectivity. By the time he began writing My Past and lhoughts in the early 1850s, Herzen had self-consciously moved away from many of the Romantic influences of his youth, but not from his intense historicism. 1 For Herzen, leaving a historical mark of the self, such as the written monument of My Past and lhoughts, serves as a means of both recording history and shaping it; the text places a personalized border around historical events. As Ginzburg shows, Herzen's work is a literary expression of his philosophy of history. 11 The text of My Past and lhoughts, then, is especially open to the narrative tension of simultaneously constructing history and recording it. For example, writing the text encompassed a period of fifteen years (1852-1867), a significant portion of the author's life, and an interval long enough to allow both the author and readers to witness the actions of history through time as the text progressed. 12 The narrator of My Past and lhoughts envisions his subject-himself-as a crystallization of historical processes, and the literary narration of his life is meant, on the one hand, to serve as a frame through which to view the passage of history and, on the other, as a means by which to permanently affix it in time and space. As with writers such as Karamzin, Goncharov, and especially Pushkin, for Herzen writing is itself a crucial component of the author's identity: as a member of the liberal elite, he writes in order to prevent the loss of that which would otherwise be erased from the public record-the life of a liberal intelligent in Nicholaevan Russia. Further, the text itself-written over the course of so many years-provides a "home" for Herzen in emigration; it is a space that is at once shared and intimate in which to record the trace of his passage through time and space. That his memoir will itself travel, and is, like any text, nomadic, lends a special poignancy to its role as a home space for the author. While writing provides the necessary historical trace for Herzen, as an author he is aware that it provides at best an imperfect historical record. Written artifacts necessarily bear the marks of their time and place, revealing alternately more than was meant and less than was intended about themselves and their creator. Writing affixes events and places on paper, but it does so within the subjective frame placed around it by the author, a frame that is itself accidental, exposing more about the placer of the frame than the events contained within it. In the 1860 foreword to "Camicia Rossa," Herzen explicitly notes the problematic nature of writing personal history:

°

The newspapers are full of detailed descriptions of fetes and banquets, speeches and swords [... ]. I do not intend to enter into competition with them, but simply want to

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give afew ofthe snapshots I have taken with my little camera from the modest corner from which I looked on. In them, as is always the case in photographs, much that is accidental is [captured} and retained, awkward draperies, awkward poses, over-prominent details, with the lines of events lefi: untouched and lines of faces unsofi:ened. 13

Despite its artificial nature, the written document, like the photograph, resists its creator's control. It is, for this very reason, an artifact of immense historical value, both for what it explicitly seeks to historicize and for that which it historicizes unintentionally. It is in this combination of the deliberately captured and the accidentally revealed that the full picture of history is found. Although the author's creation ultimately wanders far from his pen, this straying is, in fact, a crucial part of the historical process. Even the writer most determined to preserve history cannot control the traces he leaves-or fails to leave-behind him. This consciousness of history's own itinerant nature, or at least of the semiaccidental nature of what is fixed in the historical record, is the motivating factor for My Past and Thoughts, a text that seeks to both historicize and demonstrate the complexities-or vagaries-of history itself.

Forms of Narrative Wandering: The Traveling Consciousness Just as history is a complex and at least partially accidental or random process for Herzen, so are the processes of memory and consciousness, central themes of My Past and Thoughts. The memoir opens with a description of Herzen's childhood recollection of being told of the invasion of 1812, an event he lived through as an infant. As scholars have noted, the anecdote emphasizes the coincidence of Herzen's personal story with history on a grand scale. The appearance of this anecdote serves another crucial purpose, however, in establishing both the mature narrator and the child Herzen as rememberers, or those who love to recall past events, even those in which they were not conscious participants. This activiry of intense remembering links the child with the adult, who now fondly recalls his own youthful act of voyeuristic retrospection. As a story he was told by his nurse, the family narrative of 1812 falls within the realm of Herzen's conscious experience as a child, and as such comprises an element of those childhood "past and thoughts" that are recollected later as an adult. Importantly, however, the story has already traveled through time by the point at which Herzen first consciously hears it. Ultimately, it has many layers: it bears the trace of its original time and place even while it also carries the marks of Herzen's childhood awareness of it and the later imprint of his adult recollection.

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This is but one example that illustrates a larger point: My Past and Thoughts comprises many separate pieces, composed at different times and dealing with different aspects of Herzen's life. As Herzen acknowledges, the text is disorderly, both in terms of its construction and its content, but he argues that this arrangement is itself a crucial aspect of his project. It serves as an accurate reflection of his personal history, something that has not proceeded in an orderly fashion. This important function is reason enough for him to reject any attempt at organizing the parts of the text in an orderly way, as he notes in the 1860 preface: "My Past and Thoughts was not written in succession. Entire years lie between different chapters. It is due to this that everything bears the hue of its time and the various states of my mind-I would not wish to erase this." 14 Thus My Past and Thoughts is less a narrative whole than it is a compilation of artifacts that are presumed to preserve Herzen's conscious experience at the time of their writing and as such are invaluable for what they reveal, not of the events described, but of the consciousness of the author at different moments of remembering them. As the narrator explains in the passage above, the process of remembering is necessarily influenced by one's state of mind, as well as, presumably, by external factors beyond one's control. Herzen has framed My Past and Thoughts as a "historical" mark of himself: the text represents what he thought and did at various points as remembered at other, later points in time, a necessarily achronological, or temporally disorderly, process. Following Paperno's persuasive interpretation, My Past and Thoughts can be read as a deliberate attempt to embody the development of Herzen's consciousness over time in narrative form. 15 Moreover, as scholars have pointed out, Herzen's text is hardly an unmediated or "pure" expression of his life: much has been omitted from the text, and much of the reality has been reconceptualized and even rewritten. 16 While such historical tampering would seem to contradict Herzen's stated aim of verbally "photographing" history (as stated in the 1860 preface), such writerly adjustments actually fit the task of recording Herzen's view of events at the time ofwriting, rather than any presumed task of an "objective" recording of historical events and processes. "Herzen's view" is itself a historical process, a response to events and experience that unfolds over time and hundreds of pages. It is precisely this personal experience of reality that will disappear if Herzen does not capture its trace in writing at the moment of its existence: "The history of the recent years of my life presented itself to me more and more clearly. I saw with horror that not a single person, except me, knew this history, and that with my death, the truth would die." 17 This is, of course, the truth as Herzen sees it (or wishes to see it), and it is one that is at times greatly at odds with other accounts, most notably in the case of the infamous "Family Drama," in which Herzen's wife

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Natalie was romantically and scandalously involved with the German poet Georg Herwegh. Herzen was not aware of all of the details of his wife's relationship with Herwegh, but he also chose not to disclose or acknowledge other details in his recounting of the affair. 18 Notably, the "history'' of the last years of Herzen's life includes a variety of material, from the recollection of specific thoughts and experiences (stories of youth, the moment of departure from Russia) and the retelling of past events from a later perspective, to the integration of anecdotes and personal letters and the borrowing of ideas and observations from his own earlier published work. Herzen's authorial interest in the twin processes of memory and autobiography began at an early age; he commenced his first autobiographical text, Notes of a Certain Young Man (Zapiski odnogo molodogo cheloveka), at the age of twentyfive. The autobiographical urge was a consuming one: in addition to such highly personal fictional works as Who Is to Blame? (Kto vinovat? 1847), Herzen was a prolific diarist, letter writer, essayist, editor, and man of letters. Little of his past and few of his thoughts went unrecorded, such that he left a lifetime of written artifacts behind him, to be discovered, not only by posterity, but-perhaps crucially-by Herzen himself. In the 1860 preface to My Past and Thoughts, Herzen remarks upon his "accidental" discovery of Notes ofa Certain Young Man among the Russian journals in the British Library. Though he is again engaged in writing autobiography, Herzen claims that he has forgotten this previous recounting of his earlier life experience: "When I was starting on my new work, I did not at all recall the existence of Notes ofa Certain Young Man. I somehow accidentally discovered it in the British Museum as I was looking through the Russian journals .... " 19 Like Pushkin's description of a chance discovery of a copy of "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" in Journey to Arzrum, Herzen rediscovers a younger version of himself in the British Museum, but it is a self that he can no longer recall or access directly. Like Pushkin, he claims not to be that earlier person anymore. There is an important issue at stake here: if Herzen had not captured that younger version of himself on paper, it would have been lost, both to posterity and to himself. That Herzen no longer remembers recording his own past, nor who he was at that earlier moment of recording, is a startling example of the accidental nature of history and the possibility of disappearance from the historical record. Even one's own past and most intimate thoughts can be lost to oneself; therefore, one must take the utmost measures to leave a trace of them behind. As with Pushkin, the traces one leaves do not belong solely to the author, however. Texts travel as far as, if not farther than, their writers: versions of Herzen have strayed all the way to the shelves of the British Museum. This is a twist of fate, perhaps, but also an accurate reflection of the phenomena of

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memory and experience; they are, in their essence, disorderly, even nomadic. All this is of critical importance to any individual, of course, but it also possesses a special relevance for Herzen's audience of Russian readers who are concerned with their nation's place in history, with the distortion of the national historical record by Russia's authoritarian government, and with their own inability to fulfill a personal historical role in their national context. Herzen's writing is eclectic and digressive, reflecting the range of topics and memories his mind encompasses. Digression is, in fact, a self-conscious device, even a credo, for the narrator of My Past and lhoughts: "I do not intend to avoid digressions and episodes; that is the way of every conversation, that is the way of life itsel£" 20 The vicissitudes of his writing, then, reflect both the external course of his peripatetic life and the travels, or wanderings, of his own consciousness; as such, these vicissitudes lie at the very core of My Past and lhoughts and form an integral element of Herzen's image as a Russian radical who is itinerant, digressive, and not constrained by the conventions of narrative. The topoi of wandering and digression profoundly inform the very nature of the project of My Past and lhoughts, as they do the autobiography's structure itself. Writing functions as a home space for Herzen and allows him to leave a historical trace, but it is also a form of travel and of dissemination of his ideas and experience. Further, writing operates as the process of history itself: what is written down remains, but not always in one place. Discussion now turns to a different question: how do the events of Herzen's life mirror the meta-concerns with consciousness and history described here?

The Autobiography of a Russian Wanderer In his classic 1933 study lhe Romantic Exiles, noted Herzen biographer Carr contends that Herzen became a "wanderer on the face of the earth'' after leaving Russia in 1847. Herzen himself suggested in an 1836 letter to his future wife that he commenced "years of wandering" when his studies finished in 1834. 21 Both turning points are apt, if in some sense arbitrary, for the symbolically homeless Russian emigre: Herzen's life story as told in My Past and lhoughts is shaped from the outset by displacement, rootlessness, and movement. Multiple journeys, each politically motivated to some degree, are at the very center of the life Herzen presents to his readers. These journeys frame him as a born wanderer, literally "on the road" from his earliest days. The narrative famously begins with a description of Herzen's family's flight from their home in Moscow during the French invasion of 1812, an event the adult Herzen labels his "first journey." 22 In its critical position as opening anecdote to the multi-volume work and in its temporal proximity to

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Herzen's birth (he was five months old at the time), the tale of the escape from Moscow places special emphasis on movement and disruption as the defining characteristics of his life. The family's flight marks the first in a series of significant lifetime journeys for Herzen that would include two internal exiles, emigration, and frequent moves among the capitals of Western Europe. Notably, Herzen's early adventure is one that serves both to cast his life in peripatetic terms and to demonstrate the displacement resulting from the intersection of his personal life with larger historical forces. Due to his father's indecisiveness, the family remained in Moscow after most residents had left the city. Driven from their house by the fires, but unable to flee the occupied city, the entire Iakovlev household found itself camped on one of the city's central squares, Tverskaia ploshchad', alongside a motley assortment of other displaced Moscow residents. 23 Disorder and chaos define the scene in Herzen's recollection. The last vestiges of civilization disappear before the family's eyes: a servant kills a French soldier attempting to steal their horse, and the household is reduced to surviving on food looted from stores or begged from French soldiers. The clothes covering the infant Herzen are lost in a military search, leaving him covered by nothing more than a piece of felt torn from a billiard table. The family's precarious situation is relieved only by a chance encounter with one of Napoleon's commanding officers, the Duke de Treviso, a close acquaintance of Herzen's father from his time in Paris. The Duke's protection earns Ivan Iakovlev a personal interview with Napoleon; Iakovlev is able to negotiate safe passage for the family in exchange for delivering an official communique to Alexander I. 24 The family's presence in the burning city exposed them to very real danger, but it also provided a direct and privileged experience of the historical moment of 1812, an experience that more or less guaranteed Herzen's status as a true Russian. It also offered his father, at least, a face-to-face encounter with the man who was arguably the most important historical personage of the nineteenth century. As Paperno has argued, Herzen's depiction of his father's meeting with Napoleon recalls the famous chance meeting between the "poor professor" Hegel and Napoleon on the streets of Jena in 1806, whence Hegel had set out to seek protection after the French victory. While the meeting between Iakovlev and Napoleon does not provoke Iakovlev to profound meditations on the nature of history, as it did with Hegel, it does perhaps play a role in initiating Herzen's future reflections on the same subject. It is also a manifestation of what Paperno identifies as an important chronotope, that of the encounter between an individual writer-philosopher and the highest authority, in the form of the tsar or Napoleon-embodiments of "power-history'' itself. 25 Such encounters are connections that matter to Herzen, who comments on his childhood reaction to the story: "And I smiled with pride, pleased that I had taken part in the war." 26

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Many important themes of Herzen's biography come to light in this opening passage, including flight, history in progress, and the capturing of personal history, or that which would otherwise be lost, in narrative form. The adult Herzen recalls begging his nanny to tell and retell the story of the family escape, and he opens his autobiography with his recollection of her story. The experience she describes is both Russian history in general terms and an intimate family story, complete with domestic details such as the nanny's comments on his father's lack of organization.27 The story has been told many times by the nurse, but it is only properly historicized when the adult Herzen commits it to paper where it is presented as his preeminent memory of childhood. Additionally, the story reveals certain problematic aspects of Herzen's Russian identity. His father's loyalties are seemingly tested by the invasion. Iakovlev's ties to Western Europe, and to France in particular, seem to set him in opposition to the Russian cause: he has potentially closer social ties to Napoleon than to Alexander. (Indeed, he was placed under arrest upon his arrival in Saint Petersburg on suspicion of treason.) Also important to the story is the description of the family's loss of their home and subsequent displacement among crowds of disorderly refugees, all witnesses to the destruction of the heart of Russia. The reader is presented with a vision of an apocalyptic clash between Napoleon's army and the disordered Russians. In this clash an entire national domestic livelihood is lost. The "fire of Moscow" is an important Russian cultural myth, one that speaks to the issue of national character. The widely held belief that Russians started the fire themselves under the orders of military governor Rostopchin in order to prevent Napoleon and the Grande Armee from appropriating the city-unlike the more cautious residents of Vienna or Berlin-suggests a lack of attachment to the center of national domestic and historic life. 28 The fact of Muscovite flight from the city and apparent willingness to destroy the ancient capital was seen, by the French at least, as a "barbaric" and "uncivilized" act. Arguably, it is even nomadic in metaphoric terms: nation and territory are not inseparably linked in this context, not as they are assumed to be in the "civilized" centers of Europe; rather, national space appears to be easily abandoned by the Russians, and their civilization proves nothing but a thin veneer, quickly relinquished in the face of danger and replaced with a retreat into "nomadic" tactics of destruction and flight. In recounting this myth in such a crucial position in the narrative, Herzen allies himself forcefully with a Russian identity, but it is an identity that is linked to crisis, destruction, and lack of attachment to that which Europeans presumably hold most dear: home and homeland. The complex relationship to history portrayed in Herzen's description of the Moscow fire-he is both participant in historical events and victim of historical

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circumstance-serves in part as an opening anecdote because it contains many of the themes that prove central to the autobiography as a whole. It finds a correlation in the unusual nature of his family situation as a child. Though his father was a member of an old aristocratic family, Herzen was illegitimate and thus did not bear his father's name. Herzen's "false position," as he refers to it, does not materially interfere with his social standing, but it does cut him off from his family's history and prevent him from carrying on the family line. His name, in fact, proclaims his illegitimate status-he is a "child of the heart," not a legally recognized child. In fact, Herzen's extended family contained a number of illegitimate children, including his father's other son Egor and additional offspring produced through his uncles' liaisons with serf women. 29 Among these was Herzen's first cousin and future wife Natalia Zakhar'ina. The fact of illegitimacy lent Herzen's biography a distinctly Romantic flavor, and the question of illegitimacy-or disinheritance-deeply flavors the depiction of events in My Past and Thoughts. On one level, this disinheritance is reflected in the discomfort that characterizes his father's house: his parents live in separate wings, speak different languages, and rarely interact with each other or with the outside world. Herzen presents his father as at once tyrannical and isolated, choosing to seclude himself from society as well as from the family he dominates. His father's withdrawal from the world-a form of voluntary exile or social disinheritance-creates a prison-like atmosphere for the young Herzen: "The insufferable dreariness of our house grew greater every year. If my University time had not been approaching, if it had not been for my new friendship, my political enthusiasm and the liveliness of my disposition, I should have run away or perished." 30 In this, at least, Herzen is not his father's son-he has not inherited his father's reclusive or anti-social streak. Notably, however, the irregular arrangements of Herzen's childhood home will be replicated to some extent in his adult life when he finds himself at the center of a very unconventional family arrangement. Herzen portrays his childhood self as intrinsically "homeless," even in his family home: he is illegitimate, half German, half Russian, alienated from his despotic father, cut off from the larger community, and sensitive to the political and social injustices he perceives around him. The domestic hearth is anything but welcoming, and Herzen's lack of attachment to family life as a boy is underscored in My Past and Thoughts by his demonstration of rapid attachment and acclimatization to the group life he finds at the university: "I was more at home in [the university] in a fortnight than I had been in my father's house from the day of my birth." 31 Indeed, connection to his peers proves to be his most important source of identification. The friendship he forms with Nikolai Ogarev at the age of fifteen will be the most enduring relationship of his life and will

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form the core of a circle of like-minded friends, of whom Herzen will imagine himself the representative. 32 Opposition to father figures is an important aspect of this generational identity: the young Herzen and Ogarev, also estranged from his father, come together over their similar admiration of the Decembrists and revulsion for the national father-figure Nicholas I, as well as through their shared rejection of their own fathers. His father's isolation and eccentricity, while crucial to the characterization of Herzen's alienated childhood, are something more than a family matter in My Past and Ihoughts. Herzen identifies his father as a "product of the eighteenth century," arguing that his personality was formed during the period in which Enlightenment ideas were introduced into a Russian society in which they were perceived as profoundly alien. Like other "eighteenth-century people," Herzen's father is characterized as having been severed from his native Russian culture by the foreign nature of his education: "When he was being educated, European civilisation was still so new in Russia that to be educated was equivalent to being so much the less Russian." 33 This erasure of Russian identity has, in fact, made Herzen's father into an internally displaced person, a foreign exile within his own country, who, importantly, can no longer pass on the inheritance of his forefathers. In My Past and Ihoughts, Ivan lakovlev's severance from his native culture is represented as a trauma, one that is manifested in his emotional inability to provide a home, or comfortable domestic milieu, for his family. What originated as an eighteenth-century phenomenon-Russia's imitation of the West and corresponding perception of the loss of its own identity-is very much a nineteenth-century problem, one that sons, even illegitimate ones, inherit from their fathers. His father's cultural alienation means that the child Herzen does not possess a native point of origin: he has been born into the cultural crossfire between Russia and Europe-almost literally in the case of the invasion-and into the perceived schism between Russian and European selfhood, a schism that finds a literal parallel in the divided spheres of the family house. Herzen is doubly illegitimate: he is legally excluded from his own family line and, as the son of an "eighteenth-century person" such as his father, he is excluded from the Russian native tradition. One might argue that Herzen inherits a legacy of disinheritance. He does not belong to an ongoing national or family line; rather, in a figuratively nomadic sense he is not connected to the history that came before him. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that My Past and Ihoughts begins not with a description of Herzen's family or actual birth, but with a recounting of certain historical events close to his birth. While it is hardly unusual for a memoir to begin at the beginning of the author's life, the choice to open with the fire of Moscow is significant: Russia's own history of the nineteenth century-the newfound patriotism after Napoleon's defeat-

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comes into being at the same moment that Herzen's personal life story begins. Nation and protagonist alike are born out of a great rupture with the past.

Inheriting the Dispossessed: The Image of Chaadaev in

My Past and Thoughts The theme of disinheritance or dispossession plays out in other ways in

My Past and Thoughts, most notably in a concern with father figures and confrontation with authority. As an adult, Herzen would devote the entirety of his life to political activism, a conscious engagement with public affairs that was in direct contrast to his father's self-imposed exclusion from the Russian civic and social spheres. Throughout My Past and Thoughts, Herzen presents himself as actively rejecting his father's worldview, but also as permanently marked by his father's severance from traditional Russian culture. The struggle against his own father mirrors the generational struggle against autocracy, particularly against the repressive Nicholas I; both are Romantic impulses. It is in this context that the figure of Chaadaev plays a prominent role in My Past and Thoughts as a model of the "fatherless" political actor who both embodies and protests his dispossession. Ironically, the biographies of Chaadaev and of Herzen's father share some characteristics. As was typical for a man of his position at the time, Ivan Iakovlev served in the army in his youth, but in 1797 he resigned from active service. Much less typically, he lived and traveled in Europe for ten years, from 1801 to 1811, only returning to Russia when required to by the mounting hostility with France. As with Chaadaev, Iakovlev's extensive travel abroad and seclusion from Russian society when at home were indicators of personal disillusionment (and, possibly, dysfunction). This seclusion was received by contemporaries, however, as a political gesture, meant to point to the impossibility ofliving a fully realized life in the face of the peculiarities of the Russian situation. These gestures came to be emblematic of an elite, if eccentric, Russian persona, to whom Herzen ascribed the label "eighteenth-century person," but who might more fully be understood to represent the educated Russian subject, displaced or rendered figuratively homeless in his own land by his Europeanization and inability to condone the practice of Russian autocracy. Such figures constitute an internal diaspora of a psychologically displaced elite. Herzen devotes considerable attention to Chaadaev and his First Philosophical Letter in My Past and Thoughts, presenting him as a Romantic figure who performs political action in the form of public utterance, a depiction that would later lie at the heart of Soviet scholar Iurii Lotman's seminal analysis ofChaadaev in "The Decembrist in Daily Life." Chaadaev functions as a conscious role model

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for Herzen and as an explicitly vocal counterpoint to his own father's political silence; Chaadaev is presented as the father figure who speaks directly to the crisis of national fatherlessness. 34 The unexpected and scandalous publication of Chaadaev's Letter is of momentous importance in the text; it is the last word, or "border" (rubezh), in the collective Russian experience of political and social repression under Nicholas I, the ultimate protest in a land where protest is impossible, and it is an event that succeeds in leaving a highly visible mark on Russian affairs. Herzen's depiction of the Letter's publication as a historical event serves to underscore the dearth of what might more typically be considered historical events in Nicholaevan Russia: [Chaadaev's letter] was in a sense the last word, the dividing point[ ... ]. What, one may wonder, is the significance of two or three pages published in a monthly review? And yet such is the strength of utterance, such is the power of the spoken word in a land of silence, unaccustomed to free speech, that Chaadaev's letter shook all thinking Russia[ ... ]. To speak was dangerous, and indeed there was nothing to say; all at once a mournful figure quietly rose and asked for a hearing in order calmly to utter his lasciate ogni speranza. 35

In Herzen's telling, the "mournful figure" of Chaadaev is itself a form of utterance. His person is the embodiment of protest; as Herzen claims, he is a "living veto." In other words, Chaadaev has devoted what limited tools he has-his persona and his pen-to making a legible political statement, a gesture that appeals greatly to the young Herzen. With the publication of the Letter, Chaadaev succeeds in enacting the unthinkable in 1830s Russia: speaking on a par with the highest authority, the only individual allowed to speak freely, the tsar himself This gesture of speaking freely is one that Herzen learns well from Chaadaev's model. In emigration, he will continually reenact the gesture of verbal protest for the Russian audience at home: the journals he published at his own expense in England between 18 57 and 1867, lhe Bell (Kolokol) and lhe Pole Star (Poliarnaia zvezda), as well as his other publications, provided a mouthpiece for the Russian liberal elite in emigration and allowed the Russian home audience to take part in this conversation, if passively. Like Chaadaev's Letter, or personal behavior, Herzen does not plot a rebellion so much as assume his right to an opinion or position of his own, a civic privilege in Russia granted only to the tsar. A declaration of one's right to exist, to possess thoughts, opinions, and criticism, is what Chaadaev's Letter embodies for Herzen when it reaches him in exile in Viatka. He will later view his own publications in emigration as intended to accomplish the same for others: "I had at all costs to get into communication with my own people; I longed to tell them of the weight that lay on my heart.

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Letters could not get in, but books would get through of themselves; writing letters was useless-I would print; and little by little I set to work upon My Past and Ihoughts, and upon founding a Russian printing-press." 36 Even as far away as London, Herzen's primary concern was with speaking to a home Russian audience in formal terms, that is, through the channels of official publication, thereby demonstrating the very possibility of debate and dissent, a focus that recalls Chaadaev's act. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, private forms of writing were as subject to authoritarian control as public forms in nineteenth-century Russia. Just after he finished his studies at Moscow University in 1834, Herzen was arrested on the basis of incriminating personal letters that had been found among Ogarev's possessions. 37 After ten months in prison, Herzen and several other members of his university circle were exiled to remote provincial towns. The episode is important to Herzen's life trajectory, in part because it reveals the fact that Herzen, Ogarev, and their circle were silenced before they could perform any public gesture, written or otherwise. Such a context, in which university students were arrested on the suspicion that they might someday speak openly, throws the actual publication two years later of Chaadaev's Letter, accidental or otherwise, into stark relief. The authorities guaranteed that no other such public "acts of insanity" were conceivable. In My Past and Ihoughts, exile to Viatka marks the end of Herzen's youth; importantly, it is portrayed as an expected, even consciously desired, culmination to an alienated and rebellious childhood. The onset of manhood is marked by a direct confrontation with the highest authority, the state itself, and by a journey. In a move that recalls the fate of the Decembrists as well as Chaadaev's wellknown 1821 resignation from the army, Herzen claims to have had fantasies of resistance and punishment while growing up. These fantasies mark him as a particular kind of Russian, one who suffers for his noble resistance to tyranny and is displaced by this resistance: I imagined in a hundred variations how I would speak to Nicholas, and how afterwards

he would send me to the mines or the scaffold. It is a strange thing that almost all our day-dreams ended in Siberia or the scaffold and hardly ever in triumph; can this be characteristic of the Russian imagination, or is it the effect of Petersburg with its five gallows and its penal servitude reflected on the young generation? 38

The terms of Herzen's fantasy here-speaking with the tsar and receiving drastic punishment-strongly recall Chaadaev's meeting with Alexander I in 1821, described in Chapter 2. Scholars have assumed that Chaadaev intended to use his assignment as messenger as an opportunity to speak directly with

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the tsar about the need for reform in Russia, in a scenario that was similar to that of the conversation between the Marquis of Posa and the tyrannical King Phillip II of Spain in Schiller's Don Carlos. Herzen appears to have Chaadaev's Schillerian behavioral model in mind in this passage; moreover, Don Carlos was an influential text for the young Herzen. 39 As mentioned earlier, the chronotope of the philosopher/ poet speaking directly to the tsar was already a powerful image in the Russian context, and one that resonated with liberals such as Herzen and his circle. Here it surely comes into play in the shape of Herzen's fantasy of speaking to Nicholas. Herzen's youthful dreams have a peculiar slant: his fantasy does not include political action, such as that of an uprising or assassination; rather, he fantasizes about receiving punishment, that visible and highly prized mark of tsarist disfavor. Coming of age for Herzen and his circle, then, is defined by coming to the personal attention of the tsar for the possession of personal views and by experiencing extreme punishment in the form of exile or death. Chaadaev the bold speaker becomes an alternate father figure for Herzen in the 1830s, a role model who creates a behavioral paradigm for a rebellious post-Decembrist Russian subject and who demonstrates a means of challenging autocracy even in the most restrictive of circumstances. Speaking out is impossible at home; it becomes the raison d'etre for Herzen's life abroad. Chaadaev's importance, however, lies not just in his behavior, but also in the content of what he has uttered. Chaadaev's charge that Russia lacked a history and that its subjects were not attached to national life greatly influenced Herzen's extensive engagement with the question of Russian identity. As we will see below, Herzen's characterization of Russia as the radical opposite of a seemingly ossified bourgeois West arguably develops notions initially set forth in Chaadaev's Letter and other texts. As Tolz has argued, Herzen and others' vision of Russian Socialism was a Romantic response to the difficult questions posed by Chaadaev. Their vision of Socialism assigned Russia a "historic mission" in which backwardness became an advantage. 40 Herzen's 1834 exile to Viatka is described as his "second journey" after the flight from Moscow, and it marks the beginning of an itinerant adult life. After four years in government service in the provincial towns of Viatka and Vladimir, Herzen was exiled for a second time, to Novgorod, in 1840, also for the private expression of personal opinion. In this instance, a letter to his father included a contemporary anecdote about the Saint Petersburg police, to which Herzen added his own sarcastic comment. This proved reason enough for the authorities to take action against him for a second time, though he was now exiled to a less remote locale. 41 After a further two years spent in absence from Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Herzen and his wife Natalie returned to Moscow, but Herzen no longer wished to remain in Russia. In My Past and Thoughts, he

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cites the bitter experience of internal exile, surveillance, and disagreement with the members of his own intimate circle as driving an all-consuming desire to leave Russia: "To go away, far away, for years, only to go!" 42 Despite his deep philosophical commitment to Russia, Herzen cannot make a home there-he feels psychologically displaced or unsettled whether he resides in the center of Moscow or the provincial periphery. The combination of his awkward upbringing and his dangerous political views bar him from comfortably residing in either the familial or national domestic spheres. This double displacement is presented as an essential aspect ofHerzen's character: he is a member of the Russian educated elite for whom Russia does not-and cannot-provide a home. In 1847, following his father's death, Herzen sought and received official permission to travel to Europe with his family. Though the departure was not initially intended to be permanent, it effectively resulted in emigration, as he never returned to Russia. Herzen was not officially exiled, but his participation in politically radical European circles, especially during the Revolution of 1848, meant that he could not return to Russia without facing severe punishment while Nicholas I was alive. 43 Like his father, Herzen removed himself from Russian society, though in a different fashion. From an alienated childhood within the confines of his father's house to a young adulthood spent in internal exile at the provincial peripheries of the Russian empire, Herzen's life in Russia was marked both by restricted movement and enforced removal. Emigration from Russia was yet another removal, placing him as it did irrevocably on the other side of the Russian border and transforming him into a permanent, if half-voluntary, exile. In what ways would real exile influence Herzen's persona? How would Herzen's experience of Europe help to shape his self-image in My Past and Thoughts as a restless Russian wanderer? I turn now to representations of the Russian border in Herzen's text.

To the Other Shore: The Chronotope of the Russian Border In the passage quoted earlier, Herzen refers to Chaadaev's Philosophical Letter as a "border" or "boundary'' experience for "thinking Russia," meaning that it marked the absolute limit of protest under Nicholas I. More broadly, a concern with borders, boundaries, and limits-of experience, of Russian authorityserves as a defining topos of My Past and Thoughts, in which the experiences of emigration and departure are refracted in a number of ways. The image of crossing the actual Russian border serves as an important structural device in the text: where the protagonist initially could not leave Russia, once abroad,

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he cannot return. As a rebel against the Russian state, Herzen is interested in identifying the limits of Russian political power and in challenging these limits. The departure also offers a convenient severance point. Where before Herzen was displaced within his own homeland, an internal exile, he is now an emigre; as such he becomes a literally rootless figure with no permanent home. It is not surprising, then, that experience of the actual border, or with the physical limit of Russian power, plays an important role in My Past and Thoughts. Motifs of crossing and departure are essential to Herzen's self-characterization as a Russian caught in a permanent state of alienation, both within Russia and abroad. Departure from Russia is, in fact, recalled more than once in My Past and Thoughts, and this recurrence suggests the profound importance of this event to the protagonist's identity. 44 Pushkin and Dostoevsky present us with an imperial border that recedes or disappears from view, and Karamzin offers the reader an imperial border that is extended, yet porous: the traveler can come and go across it. In contrast, Herzen's border is distinct, fixed, and permanent: once across, he cannot return. In My Past and Thoughts, a description of the border crossing first occurs close to the midpoint of the narrative, thus dividing Herzen's life into two halves. The scene of Herzen's physical departure from Russia is presented in sharp detail and is treated in the text as a verbal photograph (to recall Herzen's earlier quote), a scene that can be viewed and reviewed: The sergeant gave me back our passports: a small, old soldier in a clumsy casque covered with American leather, carrying a gun of disproportionate size and weight, lifted the barrier; an Ural Cossack with narrow little eyes and broad cheek-bones, holding the reins of his little, shaggy, disheveled nag, which was covered all over with little icicles, came up to wish me a happy journey; the pale, thin, dirty little Jewish driver with rags twisted four times round his neck clambered on the box. 'Good-bye! Good-bye!' said our old acquaintance, Karl Ivanovitch, who was seeing us as far as Taurogen, while Tara's wet nurse, a handsome peasant woman, dissolved in tears as she said farewell. The little Jew whipped up his horses, the sledges moved off. I looked back, the barrier had been lowered, the wind swept the snow from Russia on to the road and blew the tail and mane of the Cossack's horse to one side. The nurse in a sarafan and sleeveless jacket was still looking after us and weeping; Sonnenberg, that symbol of the parental home, that comic figure from the days of childhood, waved his silk handkerchief-all around was the endless plain of snow. 'Good-bye, Tatyana! Good-bye, Karl Ivanovitch!' Here was a milestone and on it, covered with snow, a thin and single-headed eagle with outspread wings ... and it is so much to the good that it is one head less. 45

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The border here is a manifestation of a geopolitical reality: one imperial realm may be exchanged for another; in this case, Russia for Prussia. Yet the space of the border, and the experience of crossing it, is important in ways that recall the other writers discussed in this book. Symbols of state authority abound at the outpost, from the soldier with the oversized gun to the post with the oneheaded Prussian eagle on it. More importantly, the space possesses a fairy-talelike, or supernatural, sense of border-ness: it is populated exclusively by "border people," such as the Jewish cart driver and the Cossack with "narrow eyes and slanted cheekbones." These figures are members of marginalized ethnic groups that were specifically associated with the border regions of the Russian empire. The Cossack's facial features are Asiatic, suggesting that the Russian border with Prussia marks the border between Europe and Asia. As if on purpose, the wind blows from Russia, driving Herzen and his family away and sending cold and snow after them. The scene is given an elegiac feel by the melancholy tone of the narrator: he speaks largely in the imperfective past tense, as if reexperiencing the event anew. The word "Good-bye" (proshchaite) is repeated five times, underscoring the finality of the departure; Herzen looks backward as they leave, toward Russia and the past, and not toward Europe and the future. As it will turn out, this departure is final in both temporal and spatial terms: Herzen will not return to the land of his family origins and childhood. Fittingly, those who see the family off at the very border itself are family, in the form of domestic servants: the nursemaid and Herzen's former German tutor, the "symbol of the parental home," Karl Ivanovich Sonnenberg. These quintessential representatives of home life and of the Russian domestic sphere do not travel across the border (even though Sonnenberg is German). Connection to his family home and to the national domestic arena is what Herzen the emigre leaves behind in crossing the Russian border; he will never succeed in recreating these spheres in Western Europe. Knowledge of this, coupled with awareness of his wife's early death to come in Europe in 1852, help to inform Herzen's later representation of this moment. The crossing from Russia to Western Europe is configured as a crossing from one world to the next, or as the figurative death of part of the author's self: some part of "Herzen"-perhaps the most domestic part-does not survive leaving Russia, a trauma that means he cannot be fully present or "alive" in Western Europe. The West is, instead, a limbo-like space for Herzen and other displaced Russian "shadows," as he terms them, despite the fact that it is only once he is in the West that Herzen can finally act upon his political ideals. A crucial element of Herzen's life is lost in the crossing: the national domestic realm with its promise of a domestic hearth, such as the nurse and Karl Ivanovich represent, has been subsumed within the mysterious, blank space of the border.

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While Herzen and his family are seen off by the family servants at the actual border, departure from his circle of friends, with whom he has previously identified so strongly, happens earlier, and at a temporal and spatial remove from the physical crossing itself: Six or seven sledges accompanied us as far as T chorny Gryaz. There for the last time we clinked glasses and parted, sobbing. It was evening, the covered sledge crunched through the snow ... you looked mournfully after us but did not guess that it meant a funeral and eternal separation. All were there, only one was missing, the nearest of the near: he was ill, and by his absence, as it were, washed his hands of my departure. 46

Like crossing the actual border, this scene of patting is evoked in vivid detail. The narrator addresses his friends directly, and makes an implicit reference to the dying Belinsky (the missing friend), a coded remark whose meaning is clear only to members of their shared inner circle. Strikingly, this description is repeated word for word in the beginning of the next section of My Past and Ihoughts, "Paris-Italy-Paris."47 Such verbatim repetition helps to link the two volumes of the literary work, and it serves to create a set of narrative endpoints for the crossing itself. Repetition also affirms Herzen's connection to an absent Moscow circle in the face of his developing life in Europe. More importantly, however, it mimics the disjointed and repetitive nature of memory itself: critical experiences resurface in one's consciousness at very different points in time, and they reappear more or less intact. The repetition of this memory here emphasizes the deep, even traumatic significance of this moment to Herzen's self-definition as a Russian exile, unwillingly removed from his social milieu, from his homeland, and poised in an uncomfortable limbo, mentally turned toward home, yet unable to return. The chronotope of crossing the Russian border appears in other forms in My Past and Thoughts, perhaps most notably when it is explicitly recounted as a shared feature of Russian emigre experience in the form of an anecdote. Herzen retells a fellow emigre's border crossing story and, in so doing, situates the act of crossing in a larger discourse of Russian exile and emigration, one that is largely constructed by anecdote. Social "talk"-gossip, anecdotes, etc.-played a fundamental role in the literary creation of Russian intelligentsia circles, and Herzen signals his participation in such circles and their continued existence in emigration through inclusion of the anecdote. 48 The story, like any successful anecdote, both describes a concrete experience and illustrates a larger cultural truth or reality, in this case, the continually uncomfortable position of the Russian liberal emigre in relation to the Russian government:

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In Paris conversation somehow turned on the unpleasant feeling with which we cross our frontier. Galakhov began describing how he had traveled for the last time to his estate; it was a chefd'oeuvre. 'I drive up to the frontier; rain, sleet, a log painted black and white lying across the road; we wait, they won't let us through. I look out: a Cossack with a pike on horseback comes riding down upon us. 'Your passport, please.' I give it to him and say, TH come to the guard-house with you, brother, it is very wet here.' 'You can't go there, sir' [nikak nel'zia-s]. 'Why so?' 'Kindly wait.' I turned towards the Austrian guard-house, but that was no good either: another Cossack with the face of a Chinaman seemed to spring out of the earth. 'You can't

go there, sir!' What had happened? 'Kindly wait!' And the rain was pouring and pouring ... All at once a sergeant shouts from the guard-house: 'Lift it up!' There is a clanking of chains and the striped guillotine begins rising; we drive under it, the chains clank again and the beam descends. There, I thought, I am caught. In the guard-house a military clerk [kantonist] is copying out my passport: 'Is this yourself?' he asks. I promptly give him a zwanziger. Then the sergeant comes in; he says nothing, but I make haste and give him a zwanziger. 'Everything is correct, you can go on to the Customs.' I get in, drive off... only I still fancy they are pursuing me. I look round-a Cossack with a pike-trot, trot, after me ... 'What is it, brother?' 'I am escorting your honour to the Customs.' At the Customs, a clerk in spectacles looks through my books. I give him a thaler and say, 'You needn't trouble, the books are all scientific, medical!' 'To be sure they are: hey! Porter, lock up the box again!' Again a zwanziger. 49

The anecdote transforms crossing the Russian border into a set piece, one in which there is a scripted exchange between the representatives of an all-powerful Russian authority and the powerless subject. Certain features of Galakhov's description bear a resemblance to Herzen's own depiction: unpleasant weather, armed guards, and Cossacks with Asiatic features are present, as well as a "kantonist," or Jew. The suggestion of mythical or fairy tale space present in Herzen's recounting is developed as well in Galakhov's account, where the border is experienced as a magically imprisoning space in which Cossacks spring fully armed out of the earth. Once he has crossed the boundary into the border zone, Galakhov cannot turn back, even though he has not yet officially entered Russia. Setting foot into the space of the border itself means that he is now subject to Russian authority and can no longer act freely: even taking shelter from the rain is forbidden. The denizens of the border station possess an almost supernatural ability to extract bribes from travelers without explicitly demanding them. The Cossack's "Eastern features" suggest once again that crossing into Russia is tantamount to entering Asia. The words that greet Galakhov upon crossing into his homeland are negations of individual will and agency: "it is quite impossible"

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(nikak nel'zia-s) and "kindly wait" (izvol'te obozhdat), commands that signify that the traveler is subject to an arbitrary, demanding, and absolute Russian authority that does not allow individual rights or freedom, much less physical comfort. In addition to these refusals, Galakhov is forced to negotiate with Russian authority even before he has fully crossed the border: he pays four bribes in the course of the short passage, demonstrating that, as a Russian, one must pay for the privilege of returning to one's own country. More striking still is Galakhov's comparison of the roadblock at the border to a guillotine; return to Russia is tantamount to mounting the stage for one's execution. As described earlier, Herzen's departure from Russia works as a partial or figurative death; Galakhov's return to Russia is configured as another kind of symbolic death, that of his rights and dignity as an individual. Here, crossing the Russian border exacts a heavy toll: return to home ground is framed in terms of an execution, and one in which the victim must know how much to pay and to whom for the joys of such an experience. While the passage speaks in general terms to the experience of passage between Russia and Europe, the inclusion of Galakhov's anecdote provides a symmetry in My Past and Thoughts that Herzen himself cannot: where Herzen can only recall leaving Russia, Galakhov succeeds in returning, an action Herzen can imagine, but never complete. When paired with Herzen's recollection of his mournful departure, Galakhov's sardonic depiction of his return illuminates the difficult position of the Russian emigre in Europe. The Prussian-Russian border marks the divide between two diametrically separate realms: there is Russia, where the individual is constrained by the lack of civic and cultural freedoms, and there is "outside of Russia," where individuals are freer to act politically but are cut off from their home life and domestic circle. This dilemma is not an entirely Russian one, of course, and it is depicted in broader terms in My Past and Thoughts. Liberal Russian emigres in Europe are a distinct group, yet they also form part of a larger tribe, or international diaspora, of political refugees who face similar anomie both at home and abroad because of their political views. 50 This collection of people, linked not by national or ethnic ties, but by shared political and social alienation from their domestic governments, forms a loosely organized, nomadic group of wandering radicals, driven from one country to the next in search of political refuge. Herzen explicitly links this contemporary phenomenon to the Jewish diaspora in the Middle Ages, claiming that these political refugees: "had lost everything that they had hoped for, everything that they had gained ... [what shame arises] at the sight of these unfortunate ones, pursued from one country to the next, to wherever seems hospitable, like Jews in the middle ages, to whom is thrown a piece of bread, just as to the dogs, so as to force them then to continue on their way." 51 Denied permanent residence and turned away by one country

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after another, this roving band of European intellectuals and political activists is marked by its homelessness and lack of attachment to place or nation. These are themes that are central to Herzen's self-characterization as a member of a radical European intelligentsia and as a Russian. Herzen and his family join this political diaspora in 1847 when they arrive in Europe and they embark on its nomadic lifestyle, characterized by frequent moves from one place to another, and by unconventional or bohemian social structures, in which the norms of polite society are overturned or challenged. 52 In the case of Herzen's family, this means living for a time with the family of the German poet Georg Herwegh. After the scandal of Natalie Herzen's romantic involvement with Herwegh and her early death (described from Herzen's point of view in the "Family Drama," Part Five of My Past and Thoughts), Herzen moved to England. Although he resided in England for twelve years, he did not make a permanent home there, nor was he successful in creating a happy domestic circle. Rather, his family situation became increasingly complex, dominated by an unhappy liaison with the common-law wife of his best friend Ogarev, Natalia Tuchkova. 53 Herzen's itinerant life in emigration was partly due to his political allegiances and membership in an international radical diaspora. Herzen acknowledges this international dimension to his rootless existence abroad, but he also frames his situation in national terms throughout My Past and Thoughts and in other texts. Because he is a Russian exile in Europe, as distinct from the larger mix of political emigres more generally, there are additional elements of his situation that make it impossible for him to create a home in the alien space of the West. Herzen's homelessness in Europe demonstrates a Russian inability to be "at home" there, and thus forms a commentary on Russian identity and its relationship to Western Europe. At the same time, his inability-or lack of desire-to put down roots in the West serves a literary purpose in maintaining Herzen's connection with an imagined home audience.

Inventing "Russian Europe": The Search for an Imaginary Homeland As a Russian emigre-exile who has, in his own words, crossed "to the other shore" in leaving Russia for Europe, Herzen presents Western Europe as a space that is spiritually and culturally, as well as historically, dead. 54 Echoing Fonvizin and anticipating Dostoevsky's criticism of Europe in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, he criticizes Europe for what he sees as its antiquated, inauthentic, stagnant, and bourgeois culture. Herzen is hardly the first Russian writer to criticize the West, but he is the first to formulate a coherent critique of Europe in colonial terms, suggesting as he does that educated Russians in the West are displaced and

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disillusioned colonial subjects alienated from what should be their mother culture. For Herzen, as expressed in From the Other Shore (1850), Letters from France and Italy (1852), and My Past and lhoughts, the "old" Europe of France and Germany has seen revolutionary movements and radical activity, but true social and political development has failed to materialize. The historical moment of 1848 and its aftermath offered Herzen a lens through which to interpret the failure of the revolutions as evidence of Europe's inability to progress historically. Instead of Socialist reform, bourgeois materialism and love of social order have triumphed. Despite the fact that freedoms not available in Russia are guaranteed in the West, Russia has potential for revolution and change in a way that the rest of Europe does not. Here Russia's presumed lack of history is revealed to be a paradoxical freedom: it is not burdened by centuries of stagnating political and social culture. In Herzen's vision from afar, Russia is dynamic and fluid; as he claims, in an echo of Chaadaev, "nothing [with us] ... stands still." 55 Yet, as Herzen takes pains to show, the educated Russian elite fail to recognize their own national potential, in part because of their mistaken belief in Europe's progressive status. As discussed in Chapter 1, Dostoevsky's Winter Notes is similarly concerned with the blindness of the Russian elite to the true value of their authentic Russian culture. The fallacy of "Russian Europe"-that is, the imagined homeland of the culturally colonized Russian elite-forms the central issue of critique for both Herzen and Dostoevsky in these texts. Indeed, Herzen's vision of "Russian Europe" finds a powerful reflection, if not a direct embodiment, in Dostoevsky's text, as I will show. 56 In various places, Herzen takes the educated Russian elite to task for their attachment to Western European culture and resulting lack of connection to their own. In Letters from France and Italy, this cultural identity crisis is played out in terms of a Russian obsession with their western border. Elite Russians are defined by their innate longing to travel to "Europe," a place they know from books and hearsay, and with which they ally themselves fully. Their vision is clouded, however: what they perceive to be Europe is, in fact, a fictional construct, that of what might be called "Russian Europe," or an imagined cultural homeland as conceived from the "wrong" side of the border: Our situation at home is dreadful. Our eyes are constantly turned toward the door, which was locked by the tsar, and which opens only slightly and rarely. To go abroad is the dream of every decent person [poriadochnyi chelovek]. We strive to see, to touch the world we know from study, the splendid and majestic fac;:ade of which, as it was formed by the centuries, has amazed us since our childhood. We strive even harder not to see the Winter Palace or the blue and green police, or the comforting vision of triumphant order.

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The Russian rushes across the border in a kind of intoxication-heart wide open, rongue unbound [... ). At first everything seems good and more-as we expected. Then little by little, we begin not to recognize something, to be angry at something[ ... ;) we are simply ill at ease. We hide this discovery in shame[ ... ] and pretend to be inveterate Europeans-this does not succeed. 57 Herzen's Russian travelers are motivated by childhood dreams of Europe, or of a Europe that is derived from fiction and imbibed at an impressionable age, a "fo;:ade" in Herzen's terms. The passage strikingly recalls the narrator of Dostoevsky's Winter Notes, who claims to have been inspired as a child with a feverish vision of Europe generated by Ann Radcliffe's Gothic novels. Herzen's Russians are "intoxicated" by the act of crossing the border and hardly sensible of their surroundings; Dostoevsky's Russian traveler is made ill by travel to Europe-his motion sickness and liver complaint distort his comprehension of his surroundings as well. As in Winter Notes, Herzen's Russian travelers are expressly concerned with propriety and order; it is somehow "proper" to desire to travel to Western Europe, to desire to be European. Such travelers can only be disillusioned by what they find on the other side of the border, if only because they discover that representation and reality are hardly identical. "European Europe"-the real place-makes Herzen's Russian travelers "ill at ease" for this very reason-it is not the already familiar place they expected to find or to recognize immediately. Like Dostoevsky's narrator, they experience feelings of shame, in part brought on by a realization that the reality of Europe does not live up to their imagination of it, and thus are embarrassed by their naYve idealism and by their growing awareness of their own foreignness in "European Europe." Russians who travel to Europe do not find themselves returning in a spiritual sense to the land of their cultural origins, but rather, discover that they are foreigners in a foreign land. The greatest disappointment of "European Europe," then, as illustrated by Herzen and later by Dostoevsky, is its failure to provide the expected cultural homeland for Europeanized Russians, who, in their minds, at least, already reside in the shared mental-cultural terrain of "Europe." Their alienation from the native Russian sphere and allegiance to Western European culture presumably should earn them a de facto European citizenship. That this proves not to be the case, that Europe does not embrace its colonized Russian subjects as its own, is a source of a profound national disillusionment for these writers. This disillusionment reveals Europe to be itself only quasi-real, an uncomfortable space of fas:ade and simulation, and not the authentic source of a superior European culture to which the imagined Russian traveler has longed to return. Herzen's encounter with "European Europe" exposes its lack of reality and authenticity

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to such a degree that its very physical existence is called into question, an idea that will recur in Winter Notes, when Dostoevsky's traveler discovers that Berlin resembles Saint Petersburg to an incredible degree or when he fails to see Paris: Europe only looks real from afar. The way in which educated Russians came to see themselves as representatives of European culture in a "foreign" space-Russia-recalls the kind of hybrid or colonial identity that Homi Bhabha articulates in The Location of Culture. His paradigm of a "third space," or of identity that is formed of and in the "inbetween" spaces of colonial power, has been used to understand the complexities of colonial identities. In particular, it has been applied to colonized subjects (e.g., Indians under British rule) and their engagement with both their own culture and the culture of the colonizer. The concept is applicable to the colonizer as well, however. For example, English colonials in India found their relationship to their English homeland and mother culture changed by long-term residence in India; as a result, a different kind of "third," or Anglo-Indian, identity was formed, one distinct from the Anglo-Indian identity of anglicized Indians. This dual conceptualization of a hybrid colonial identity is useful in the Russian case, where the educated elite came to perceive themselves as European colonials, or as Russians who had been culturally colonized by Europe, only to become, in effect, foreigners or colonial agents in their own country. The relationship of the Russian elite to its European mother culture proves highly complex, however, as this Europeanized Russian identity is at once that of the colonized and that of the colonizer. AB Etkind has characterized it, Russia experienced "internal colonization," meaning that urban elites understood themselves to be tasked with the "burden" of civilizing their own peasantry. 58 Like Dostoevsky after him, Herzen finds it difficult to see Europe, partly because his mental gaze as an emigre-exile is turned toward a distant home, but, more pointedly, as he argues, because nothing there can be seen clearly; it does not possess the sharp focus of a real place. This is especially the case in My Past and Thoughts, where London is portrayed as fog-shrouded and indistinct to the protagonist, despite his long residence there: "Wandering lonely about London, through its stony lanes and through its stifling passages, sometimes not seeing a step before me for the thick, opaline fog and running against flying shadows-I lived through a great deal." 59 AB Carr has shown, Herzen exaggerates London's fogginess in his retellings. For example, the London fog Herzen describes upon first arriving in England is not recorded in any of the weather reports from that time. 60 The fog is metaphorical-London is invisible because it is an industrialized and alienating underworld for Herzen, not the harmonious ideal he was led to believe in by books: "There is no town in the world which is more adapted for training one away from people and training one into solitude .... "6t

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He insists that he has not made any personal connections in England, despite his long-term residence there, and he refers to the English as an "alien race" in the 1860 preface to My Past and Thoughts. English social and political institutions such as the police, the legal system, and the courts are visible to the Russian eye, but institutions in this instance do not a thriving, organic society make. 62 The vagueness and invisibility of London-described by Herzen as a "dreadful ant heap," 63 a metaphor that will notably be taken up by Dostoevsky-are taken to an even greater extreme where Paris is concerned. In a refrain that will play a central role in Winter Notes, Herzen refuses to describe Paris, both in the Letters from France and Italy and in My Past and Thoughts, because his Russian audience already knows it too well: "I am not going to describe Paris once more." 64 Like his predecessors, however, Herzen the Russian traveler has longed to see Paris since boyhood: "In Paris-the word meant scarcely less to me than the word 'Moscow'! Of that minute I had been dreaming from childhood." 65 Importantly, Paris is perceived as a cultural home on a par with his actual home, Moscow itself. His childhood dreams of the city, and longing to travel there, again paint Herzen as a displaced colonial subject, looking to the mother-culture of France from afar. As it turns out, however, the Paris of his imaginings is nothing more than the invented capital of the imaginary homeland, "Russian Europe." Paris is only a simulation of itself, one that is endlessly generated by the imagination of like-minded tourists who superimpose their preconceived version of the city over the real entity: It must not be forgotten that the present Paris is not the real Paris, but a new one. Having become a sort of gathering-place for the whole world Paris has ceased to be a pre-eminently French city. In [the] old days all France was in Paris, and nothing besides; now all Europe is there, and the two Americas besides, but there is less of itself: it has become merged in its function ofa world-hotel, a caravanserai, and has lost its individual personality, which once inspired ardent love and burning hate, boundless respect and unlimited aversion. I need hardly say that the attitude of foreigners to modern Paris has changed. The Allied troops who bivouacked in the Place de la Revolution knew that they had taken a foreign town. 7he [nomadic] tourist [kochuiushchii turist] who puts up there now regards Paris as his own; he buys it, he plays with it, and knows very well that he is essential to Paris, and that the old Babylon has rigged herselfout, rouged and powdered, not for her own sake but for his. 66

Like a prostitute, mid-nineteenth-century Paris has decked itself out for sale in false colors. Little of its true self remains to be seen; instead, it is the internationally imagined "Paris," created by the very travelers who come to

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consume-not the city itself, but its representation-that continues to exist. "Nomadic" tourists, temporarily homeless and stateless, are in their natural habitat in the "world-hotel" Paris, the pre-eminent non-place: their presence seems to leech Paris of its French character. As Culler has argued, the illusion of authenticity is necessary to tourism and travel, but authenticity is undermined by the very presence of the tourist. 67 As discussed in Chapter 1, a similar phenomenon occurs in Dostoevsky's Winter Notes, where Paris is represented as inauthentic and invisible. The "real" Paris disappears from view in Winter Notes because Dostoevsky's Russian traveler already knows it too well from literature and fantasy-he has already consumed the simulation of Paris at home and thus can no longer see the "real" simulation. His characterization of French society as disguising its real self in a manner similar to that of women using strategically placed dress pins to improve their appearance recalls Herzen's accusation that Paris is "rigged out, rouged and powdered." In both instances, Frenchness is linked to prostitution and trickery, and to a means of false advertising that is, at the same time, a clever disguise in which the authentic Paris/France is hidden from, or not revealed to, the undeserving foreign observer. 68 Both Herzen's and Dostoevsky's texts reveal that the very idea of Parisian originality may well be nothing more than a Russian myth about Europe, and France in particular. 69 Unsettling as this is-the Russian elite appear to yearn for an original that does not exist and perhaps never did, even though it was the illusion of the original that formed them culturally-this critique of Europe allows for an assertion of Russian authenticity in the face of European pretense. Where Chaadaev faulted Russia for not sharing in the course of European history, Herzen and Dostoevsky overturn this negative perception with an assertion that Russia's failure to become fully Europeanized has allowed it to preserve its authenticity, even if that authenticity is inaccessible to its own Europeanized elite. Disappointment in Europe is hardly confined to Paris and London, however. For Herzen, "Russian Europe" vanishes almost the instant he crosses out of Russia into Germany, when one of the first people he meets is a secret agent. 70 Such a meeting will find yet another echo in Dostoevsky's text when he encounters French spies upon crossing the border from Switzerland to France. Importantly, however, Herzen's encounter reveals that the government surveillance he had desired to escape in leaving Nicholaevan Russia is a fact of life in Europe as well. Spies appear frequently in My Past and lhoughts, from the student informers at Moscow University to those who infiltrate the society of Russian exiles and emigres abroad. 71 While surveillance was a reality of political life in mid-century Europe, the attention to it in My Past and lhoughts casts Herzen's identity as a representative of a radical diaspora, Russian or otherwise, into stark relief The police gaze is unsettling, and the object of its gaze is denied comfortable

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residence. Once abroad, the police gaze becomes, to some extent, one with the European gaze for Herzen: he cannot be "at home" in Paris or Geneva because he and his circle of acquaintances are subject to the persecuting and potentially punitive surveillance of various European authorities, both because of their politics and because they are foreign. Like the narrator of the later Winter Notes, Herzen experiences Europe in My Past and Thoughts and elsewhere through a form of double vision: that which he himself sees (or fails to see) coupled with the consciousness that he is himself the object of continual observation. The dual consciousness of being both subject and object of observation makes it impossible for Herzen to create any sort of refuge or home space abroad. Like the other authors considered in this book, Herzen presents a picture of an elite Russian persona who suffers from cultural displacement and figurative homelessness and is left to wander in search of a home and a homeland, both literally and symbolically. In My Past and Thoughts and elsewhere, this wandering is tied to Herzen's national identity and to his radical political stance. In this, it acquires a new dimension as the seed of a uniquely Russian revolutionary potential. Albeit in slightly different terms, both Herzen and Dostoevsky posit the idea that European inauthenticity and stagnation signal the end of the West's historical progression. Russia represents the potential for future historical development, specifically in terms antithetical to their definition of the West. Russia offers some form of the commune, whether it be Dostoevsky's vision of Christian brotherhood or Herzen's argument for Russia's nascent Socialism. Both visions suggest revolution and dynamic change.

In My Past and Thoughts, the nomadic strains of Herzen's diasporic life, his experience of political exile, and his literary concern with the nature of memory, consciousness, and the question of Russian identity are brought together in a complex text that defies conventional generic boundaries. Herzen uses writing to negotiate and to historicize the itinerancy of the nineteenth-century Russian intellectual elite. The self-proclaimed representative of a generation, Herzen was also very much a representative Russian intelligent, a figure whose personal story has been perceived over many generations as an important reflection of the national story. 72 As a Russian wanderer-emigre-exile, the Herzen of My Past and Thoughts exists in a historical limbo: his origins are in that part of Russian society that has been "long separated" from the Russian people by virtue of education and cultural proclivities. His political beliefs and Romantic self-creation place him in direct opposition to the Russian political status quo. He does not possess a comfortable place in Russian society and is forced to live abroad. Once across the border, he finds it impossible to make a home in Europe. Like the narrator

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of Winter Notes, the author of My Past and 1houghts, Letters from France and Italy, and From the Other Shore finds himself dwelling figuratively in the noman's-land of the border between Russia and Europe itself, a "homeless" political refugee and member of an itinerant radical diaspora. This is at once a political and a distinctively national identity, one that combines a symbolic Russian homelessness with revolutionary fervor: lack of domestic attachment coupled with political persecution gives rise to a drive to effect radical change. As Herzen explicitly declares in Letters from France and Italy, echoing Chaadaev yet again: "The Russian is poorer than the Bedouin .... [H]e has nothing with which he might be reconciled, which would comfort him. Perhaps the germ of his revolutionary calling lies here." 73 Radicals are not typically envisioned, nor do they see themselves, as comfortably ensconced by a domestic hearth, nor are they supposed to particularly yearn for such a spot; rather, their professed aim is change, motion, migration, destruction, and lack of attachment to conventional social forms. Such a perception, then, of Russia as nomadic, that is, as the place from which the movement of change would come and where the old, static forms would be dismantled, proved to be a powerful mythos in Russian culture, as the events of 1917 would reveal. Herzen's appropriation of Russia's seemingly nomadic character as the foundation of Russian revolutionary potential would be developed into the twentieth century by important Russian writers and thinkers, such as the poet Alexandr Blok, who would famously describe Russians as vengeful and nomadic Scythians, burning with the destructive fire of revolution and the power to destroy an ossified and stagnant Europe.

Conclusion

Yes-we are Scythians! -Aleksandr Blok, 1918

In conclusion, this book returns to its starting point, Dostoevsky's Pushkin speech of 1880. As I hope I have shown, the "Russian wanderer" whom Dostoevsky both named and vociferously bemoaned in the speech is a phenomenon that reaches far beyond the confines of Pushkin's work or even Dostoevsky's analysis. Rather, we might imagine that Dostoevsky's speech evoked the passionate response from the crowd that it did at least in part because it condensed a seminal cultural myth-that of Russians as nomadic wanderers excluded from the historical stage-into the highly charged semantic field of "Pushkin," a symbolic representation of the national subject. The two fit together well: "Pushkin," who has always been understood as the quintessential Russian figure, was an educated, liberal aristocrat and a writer, poet, and protean genius who, despite his immense talent, was never able to fully inhabit his most important role, that of national writer. I do not mean to suggest here that Pushkin is not the preeminent national writer in the Russian cultural imagination-he is-but, rather, that such a role is a necessarily complex, even unsettling one. In part, this is because the relationship between writing and authority in nineteenth-century Russia was problematic. To write about the nation authoritatively, or from a position of authority, was not really possible in the authoritarian political environment of tsarist Russia. The moral and cultural authority of the Russian writer was profound in the nineteenth century, and yet this role was not officially sanctioned, or even acknowledged, by Russian authority itself Even beyond these circumstances, however, the role

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of national writer was difficult to occupy because of the problematic nature of Russian identity. A fundamental paradox lay at the heart of the Russian writer's position: how could one be a Russian writer when the question of what it meant to be Russian was seemingly unanswered, perhaps even unanswerable, and when the nation was itself poorly, or negatively, defined, as many felt it to be? The national "home" that a domestic literary tradition might be expected to provide could not be written into being in a context in which writers viewed themselves and their national milieu as "homeless," nomadic, and even anti-domestic. Thus the figure of "Pushkin" served as such a powerful embodiment of a national mythos of nomadic wandering in Dostoevsky's rhetoric of national renewal. As noted in the Introduction, educated Russians in the nineteenth century encountered the very concept of national consciousness as something imported. This could not but shape the perception of Russian identity in fundamental and important ways. As something defined at its core by travel-the travel of ideas, the mental travel performed in acknowledging the "foreign" phenomenon of national consciousness-Russian consciousness was easily understood in metaphorical terms as nomadic. This nomadic consciousness was informed by the Enlightenment discourse of historical progression, in which modern European society was understood to be the pinnacle of historical development. Societies at the margins of, or beyond, the West's borders were viewed as necessarily at a lower stage of development. Romantic emphasis on imagery of wandering, eternal travel, and nomadic homelessness played a part in this, as did the fact that Russians were, in part, formed by the legacy of their own nomadic Mongol past. Such ideas reinforced the centrality of the metaphor of nomadism to Russian national identity and made imagery of nomads, wanderers, and travelers compelling as expressions of Russian consciousness. The metaphor of nomadism expressed a lack-of history, of rootedness, of defined national territory and culture-but, curiously, this "lack" was itself to become a seminal feature, even a badge, of Russian self-definition over the course of the nineteenth century. As is clear from Herzen's work, "freedom from" history and national domesticity could become the conceptual starting point for a rejection of the European order and for revolution. Both Herzen and Dostoevsky stress that Russia is prepared for Socialism in one form or another, while Europe is not. I began this study with a consideration of Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveler and with an examination of how the narrator, with his self-consciously comfortable pose as both a Russian-European and a European-Russian, embodies what will come to be a major preoccupation of Russian national thought. The uncertain or undefined nature of Russian national consciousness is crystallized in the image of Karamzin's Russian traveler, even while this traveler is presented as successfully cosmopolitan. In fact, one might argue that Karamzin's Russian

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traveler appears to be what Herzen's and Dostoevsky's later Russian travelers to Europe are not: a Europeanized Russian colonial subject who is the master of this ambiguous, third-space identity. His arrival in Europe can be understood as a return to the cultural motherland, and he does not experience a trauma of estrangement there, unlike his later compatriots Herzen and Dostoevsky. Letters presented the Russian reader with the figure of a Russian on the road to Europe and in Europe, a Russian who is a traveler at heart. Despite his professed attachment to his intimate domestic sphere, he finds his "home" only away from home. The tension of this position is felt even in Letters, however: the traveler does not return to the Russian domestic sphere, but remains suspended at the border, eternally poised to return. The cosmopolitan identity of the European Russian as modeled in Letters suggests that, while he may have been "at home" while traveling in Europe, he is no longer at home in Russia after his travels. While Letters appears within the broader context of the European fashion for travel writing, it is much more than an example of travel writing in the Russian context. It is among the first works of modern Russian literature, and it is one of the first texts to take up the question of Russian identity in relation to Europe. AB such, it did much to conflate the activities of writing and traveling in the Russian imagination. According to Karamzin's paradigm, the Russian traveler is a writer and, vice versa, the Russian writer is a traveler. Something of this union would lie at the heart of Russian literature in the nineteenth century and would inform the consideration of the most central questions of Russia's place in history, its relationship with Western Europe, and the very nature of Russian national consciousness itself Nearly forty years later, Chaadaev's Philosophical Letter articulates in philosophical terms a connection between Russian identity and nomadic wandering. This text, informed by both Enlightenment and Romantic contexts, suggests that Russia's perceived cultural rootlessness is the result of its seeming exclusion from the Western European tradition and resulting failure to participate in the progressive movement of history. Chaadaev's Letter enacts the "logical" extreme of Russia's position vis-a-vis rhe West: Russian cultural and historical "backwardness," coupled with the geo-historical reality of its unfixed borders and vast imperial space, were indicators that Russia, figuratively at least, occupied a lower, less defined position in the stages of historical development. It had not yet reached the level of the civilized centers of Europe and thus was rhetorically placed at the "pre-civilized" level of pastoral societies. Chaadaev was among the first to elaborate Russia's position in relation to Western Europe in historiosophical terms, and to explicitly voice concern with the "unsettled" nature of Russian national self-definition. In so doing, his rhetorical positioning of Russians as culturally nomadic operated as

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a historical marking point in Russian national consciousness. Although Pushkin was denied the opportunity to travel abroad, it is in his work that the discourse of elite Russians as nomadic wanderers-disaffected, disassociated in national and individual domestic terms-acquires the status of national myth. The fact of Pushkin's unfulfilled desire to travel, his very real banishment from Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and his symbolic exile from Europe's capitals, all played out, in personal terms, as a national "homeless" condition that was predicated on a sense of removal from the center(s) and movement around the space of the Russian empire. His early Romantic heroes embodied this crisis of rootless or peripatetic entrapment: the Prisoner and Aleko are driven from Russian society to the outer edges of the empire. Their wanderings in search of freedom lead them across the Russian border into an "uncivilized," dangerous space where they become more, not less, alone. Aleko and the Prisoner are frustrated travelers, not at home in Russia, but unable to fully leave its psychological confines. The dilemma of these Russian wanderers, forever caught at the border between home and away, between Russia and the other, and between "civilized" and "primitive" worlds, is developed more fully in the autobiographical travelogue journey to Arzrum. Here Pushkin himself enacts the dilemma of his characters in endeavoring to escape Russia at the Arpachai River, only to find that the Russian army has just taken the opposite shore. "Pushkin," the poet and national symbol, cannot separate himself from his Russianness, despite a seemingly characteristically Russian impulse to do just that. The nomadic Russian appears in unlikely places, perhaps nowhere so surprisingly as in the figure of Ivan Goncharov's famous anti-hero, Oblomov. A spiritually homeless stay-at-home, Oblomov embodies the crisis of an unfixed, unrooted Russian identity as elaborated in many places in Russian literature. In Goncharov's work this crisis is formulated partly in economic terms as a clash between a traditional, feudal way of life and an exchange-based, modern, capitalist economy, terms that would seem to favor a vision of Russian identity as rooted. Yet it is the image of a stalled traveler that forms the central paradox of Oblomov's character. Oblomov is nomadic in the sense of Chaadaev's Russians: he is severed from his roots and his domestic hearth, passed over by history, and in a state of permanent departure in which he is incapable of reaching a destination or of returning to a point of origin. While in many respects the opposite of a character such as Pushkin's Aleko, Oblomov might arguably be viewed as a non-Romantic version of the same figure. Oblomov is prosaically limited in that he does not travel beyond the confines of suburban Saint Petersburg, and he is figuratively limited in his desires and in his grasp of the larger world. And yet, like Aleko, he really does not belong anywhere, neither in Saint Petersburg nor Oblomovka. His attempt to escape to the seemingly freer world of Agafya

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Matveevna and her ilk is fatal for him-he cannot really leave his uncomfortable place in Russian society behind. It is only when he is truly abroad, as in his extratextual presence in Goncharov's travelogue, Frigate Pallas, that Oblomov can at least be legitimately homesick, that he can happily recall "home" as a harmonious, if imaginary, place. Yet this is also where Oblomov is exposed for what he is: an eternal Russian traveler. In Herzen's work the metaphor of Russian nomadism takes an important discursive turn. In My Past and Thoughts, the topos of Russian wandering is elaborated on in a number of ways. A nomadic identity of movement, disinheritance, and anti-domesticity organizes Herzen's characterization of himself, his nation, and his time and is manifested in his concern with the nature of history, writing, and individual consciousness, as well as in his critique of Western European stagnation. In its earlier iterations, the image of a nomadic or wandering Russian had functioned as a potent symbol of Russia's perceived historical exclusion from Europe and alienation in the face of European cultural hegemony, but in Herzen's view, the perception of Russian exclusion from history comes to be a positive virtue, one that is played out, in part, in terms of a contrast between the negative orderliness of Europe and the dynamic force of Russian disorder. This last is a theme that Dostoevsky would expand on in Winter Notes, where his Russians abroad possess the potentially anarchic power of disruptiveness. Where the nomadic Russians of Chaadaev's Philosophical Letter lacked identity and history, in Herzen's treatment, this nullity becomes an identity of its own-a freedom from history that combines with an emphasis on dynamic motion to form a radical, potentially violent counter to the stasis of bourgeois Europe. Herzen's potentially revolutionary Russian nomad is hardly the end of the story where the discourse of Russian nomadism is concerned, however. This central national metaphor found expression in many other key works of nineteenth-century Russian literature-A Hero of Our Time and Dead Souls, to name but the most prominent examples-and would continue to do so into the twentieth century. Arguably, Russians' capacity to think of themselves as revolutionaries and as radical historical actors stems, at least in part, from this sense of themselves as a nomadic antithesis to European civilization. Russia's emergence onto the world-historical stage in 1917 can, to some degree, be understood in terms of the discourse described in this book. The perception of themselves as historical outsiders with the potential to bring change to the world, coupled with Marxism's claim to be history's endpoint, formed a certain kind oflogical summation of a century of national thought. Given voice perhaps most powerfully in the poet Aleksandr Blok's 1918 revolutionary poem "Scythians" (Skify), the Russian Revolution was partially cast in discursive

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terms as a force of movement and as Asiatic-or nomadic-in nature. As Blok depicted the Revolution in "Scythians" and elsewhere, it is the antithesis of Western Europe's presumed bourgeois order and ossification.' Blok argues that Russia, tired of serving as the mediator between East and West, will no longer hold back the destructive power of the Mongol/Asiatic threat to Europe. This threat is clearly linked to the idea of revolution itself-it is a dynamic wave of change directed toward the West. Russia's role as intermediary between the forces of old stasis and new movement means that it is very much allied with the latter, with what is identified as the Asiatic characteristics of barbarism and potent nomadic energy: Yes-we are Scythians! Yes-we are Asians! With slanting and greedy eyes! For you-there have been centuries, for us-a single hour[ ... ]. We are accustomed, Grasping our eager, playful horses by the bridle, To breaking their heavy backs And to taming obstinate slave girls[ ... ]. We are spreading out widely through the thickets and woods In front of comely Europe! We will turn our heads to you With our Asiatic mugs! Come everyone, come to the Urals! We are clearing a place for the battle of steel machines, where the integral breathes, With the wild Mongol horde! [... ] For the last time-come to your senses, old world! To the brotherly feast of labor and peace, For the last time to the joyous brotherly feast The barbarian lyre calls you! 2

Russians here usher in a new age of Eastern force; they will let the old world fall if it does not join the wave of change rushing at it. Blok's imagery powerfully recalls the ancient Scythians, commonly described as "fierce nomadic tribes" who established an empire in Central Asia in the seventh to eighth centuries

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BCE. This nomadic identity is given new life in Blok's poem, and by his contemporaries, the writers and thinkers who called themselves Scythians and who supported the Revolution in its early days. Like the Russians in Blok's poem, the ancient Scythians occupied a middle ground between Europe and Asia and were seen as both a precursor to European civilization and a threat to it. Blok's identification with them recalls this ancient nomadic legacy on Russian territory and Russia's sense of otherness in the face of the West, even while Blok defines Russia's mission as saving the West from itself through revolution. The latterday Scythians of Blok's poem share something with Herzen's and Dostoevsky's disorderly Russian wanderers and travelers of the nineteenth century. These revolutionary Scythians are the ultimate Russian travelers ro the West: forces of pure disorder, rupture, and anarchy. In other notable examples, Russian wandering is tied to revolution in Maxim Gorky's autobiographical works, "All over Russia'' ("Po Rusi," 1912-1918) and Childhood (Detstvo, 1913), In the World (V liudiakh, 1916), and My Universities (Mai universitety, 1922). Here the elite Russian wanderer of the nineteenth century is transformed into a traveling Russian everyman, who is at once witness to the sufferings of the underclass and a radical agitator. In the post-revolutionary period, the image of the nomadic Russian-now Soviet-writer/self would emerge in Osip Mandel'shtam's journey to Armenia (Puteshestvie v Armeniiu, 1933). The poet constructs a conscious parallel between his own itinerant fateas a poet who will be erased from history by an authoritarian state, but who must nonetheless navigate the intricacies of a new nation and empire-to that of his predecessor Pushkin. It bears repeating here that in nineteenth-century Russia it was literature that was the vehicle for articulating national consciousness, both its problems and its strengths. Pushkin's heroes, Oblomov, the narrator of Chaadaev's Letter, "Herzen," were all elements of this consciousness, and this was a consciousness so deeply formed of and by literature that Dostoevsky could refer to literary characters as national archetypes in Winter Notes and in the Pushkin speech. This close identification of literature with the nation, of literature as the nation, is a different relationship than that between European literature and European identity, at least in Russian eyes. The Europe of Radcliffe's novels that so impressed the narrator of Winter Notes, or the Paris that Herzen dreamed of from earliest childhood, bore little connection to the bourgeois-industrial charmlessness of the real France, England, and Germany: as it turns out, in Europe literature is not the nation, but, rather, a trick or trompe l'oeil played on faraway readers. For all its national certitudes, Europe proved difficult to capture in prose. Russian writers like Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Goncharov, or Herzen succeed in creating an identity for Russians in a way that their European counterparts did not. In fact,

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it is the image of the writer himself who comes to function as an articulation of national identity. What I wish to underscore is that it is the image of the traveling writer-as chronicler of history, as the quintessential outsider, and as an eternal nomadic wanderer-that embodies a Russian identity: the identity of one who has been lost, alien, and itinerant, but who continues to write-to historicizehis own experience and that of the nation.

Postscript: Nomad.ism in the Contemporary Context In conclusion, I would briefly note that the concept of nomadism has acquired specific meaning in the postmodern context. While current usage shares some meaning with the earlier discourse described in this book, the contemporary theoretical implication of the term nomadism is one of transcendence: of institutions, of family, of culture, and of the state. The image of the nomad has become a potent metaphor for aspects oflate modern and postmodern experience, much as it was for the Russian Romantic condition two centuries ago. Recent usage reflects an emphasis on the contemporary experience of a globalized, denationalized, or transnational world, and it derives from a philosophical position in which margins, particularly those of mainstream culture, are of special interest, as are states of movement and fluidity, as opposed to fixed or sedentary modes of being. 3 The noted thinkers Deleuze and Guattari have championed a philosophy of nomadism as a form of resistance to late capitalist social, economic, and cultural power structures. As scholars have shown, however, their approach, while novel in many respects, is not entirely free from the nineteenth-century orientalizing view of the nomad as a "noble savage," or as a primitive, uncivilized antithesis to an all-powerful, sedentary state apparatus. 4 Scholars such as Edward Said, with his characterization of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as the "age of exile," encapsulate a related discourse of a post-agricultural, postcapitalist, post-commercial sense of personal and cultural displacement, deriving from the experience of diaspora, and the displacement and dispersal of groups of people as a result of ethnic-territorial conflict, but also, more individually, from such modern and postmodern social phenomena as the rise of mass travel, the growth of suburbia, the perceived disintegration of traditional familial and social structures, and a severance from all things local. While these are phenomena of loss, lack, and anomie, characterizations such as Said's give voice in more positive terms to an identity of mobility, cosmopolitan sophistication, and selfcontainment. Here the term is applied in a neo-Romantic way to articulate an individual experience of rootlessness and change as freedoms from national or cultural definitions. 5 Broadly speaking, nomadism in contemporary usage

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suggests a postmodern elite identity of trans-identity: this elite are defined by their ability to inhabit multiple cultural, social, and physical spaces and identities. This is, in many ways, distinct from the discourse of Russian nomadism, which possesses specific meaning regarding prevailing narratives of national identity, world history, and European civilization. And yet, there is a shared impulse in both to transform the experience of absence into a definite identity of presence, albeit one defined in terms of the power of movement and change. This study has attempted to recall when the metaphors of nomadism and wandering were understood in a unique way, as a means of articulating national concerns with history and the meaning of the nation itself It will be interesting to observe whether these will remain potent topoi in post-Soviet Russian culture, where nomadism in particular possesses the double legacy of its deep association with nineteenth-century national consciousness and its contemporary tie to an identity of elite transnationalism. In any event, the figure of the Romantic Russian wanderer remains alive and well in the world literary heritage. As Joseph Conrad so memorably portrayed him in Heart of Darkness, the foolish, yet idealistic Russian seeker-very much as described in Dostoevsky's speech-travels far in search of universal ideals and continues to look for happiness in all the wrong places.

Notes

Introduction 1. Dostoevsky, Pss, XXVI:137. Trans. mine. 2. Levitt, Russian Literary Politics, 18-20. 3. Ibid., 1. 4. The Brothers Karamazov had been appearing serially to popular acclaim for the previous year and a half in Russkii vestnik (ibid., 124). 5. Ibid., 122-7. 6. Rogger's National Consciousness in Eighteenth Century Russia, Greenfeld's Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, and Wolff's Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment provide important overviews of the problematic nature of Russian identity and national consciousness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as perspective on Western views of Russia in the same period. More recently, Tolz's Russia and Hosking's Russia: People and Empire delve into the creation of Russian national and imperial consciousnesses in the same time period. 7. See Smith, National Identity, for discussion of national mythologies and ethnosymbolism. See also Wortman's classic study of Russian national mythology, Scenarios of Power, as well as Zorin's recent study Kormia dvuglavogo orla and Maiorova's From the Shadow ofEmpire. 8. See Tolz on the importation of the French model of nationhood (Russia, 1). 9. See, for example, Wolff's discussion of the way in which Western observers conflated Eastern Europe's "barbarian" past with its contemporary society (Inventing Eastern Europe, 11, 285-7). 10. De Custine derived his 1839 characterization of Russia as nomadic at least in part from writers such as de Maistre and de Bonald, but it is also likely that this characterization drew on Chaadaev's influential 1829 critique of Russia in his First Philosophical Letter. 11. Schonle's Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary Journey: 1790-1840 and Dickinson's Breaking Ground: Travel and National Culture in Russia from Peter I to the Era ofPushkin both address the phenomenon of Russian travel writing in its heyday from 1790 to the 1840s. They provide an exploration of the travelogue genre and give a generous accounting of the variety and scope of the genre in Russian letters. Offord's Journeys to a Graveyard: Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing adds a further dimension to this picture with its focus on Russian critiques of Western Europe

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through the lens of travel writing. More recently, Layton's "The Divisive Modern Russian Tourist Abroad: Representations of Self and Other in the Early Reform Era'' addresses the institution of Russian tourism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. 12. Tolz has recently argued that Herzen's formulation of Russian Socialism was determined, in large part, by Chaadaev's critique: Herzen's Russian version of Socialism was meant to answer the questions posed in the First Philosophical Letter (Russia, 93, 98). 13. (accessed February 12, 2010). The Russian word for nomad, kochevnik, is ofTurkic origin and similarly refers to a member of a pastoral group. 14. I do not address the figure of the pilgrim in detail in this book, but it is of relevance to this discussion. The image of the pilgrim and the trope of the pilgrimage both fit well with a Romantic ideology in which life was conceived of as a circular spiritual journey. Return to the point of origin marked ascendance to a higher and sacred state of consciousness. See Abrams's seminal Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature for a detailed discussion of the Romantic conception of life as a pilgrimage. The figure of the pilgrim would play a central role in the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz's elaboration of issues of Polish identity in terms similar to those found in the discourse of Russian nomadism. In his 1832 1he Books ofthe Polish People and ofthe Polish Pilgrimage, Mickiewicz asserts that stateless Poles should conceive of themselves as carrying out a spiritual pilgrimage to restore the Polish homeland. 15. See Thompson, Understanding Russia, 14-8. 16. The term strannik in Russian denotes a wanderer, especially a religious pilgrim. The term skitalets suggests something more along the lines of a drifter, or homeless wanderer, while brodiaga carries the meaning of a tramp or vagrant. All three terms can denote a wanderer, however, and are used in a poetic sense in Russian Romantic literature, along with several associated verbs: brodit'----to roam; kochevat'----ro be a nomad, roam, wander; stranstvovat'----to wander, to travel. 17. Thompson, Understanding Russia, 21. 18. However, as Figes shows, this phenomenon may have had more in common with the practices of Eastern shamanism than nineteenth-century Russian thinkers were wont to admit (Natasha's Dance, 372--4). 19. Wood, "Russia's 'Wild East,"' 120. The 1877 Brodiachaia Rus' khrista-radi (Wandering Russia-in-Christ) by S. Maksimov provides a fascinating late nineteenthcentury portrait of the various types of sectarian wanderers/vagabonds to be found across Russia. 20. As Wolff and others note, the word civilization is an eighteenth-century neologism, coined to describe the forms and practices of civility, or manners, believed to distinguish Europeans from their non-European counterparts (Inventing Eastern Europe, 12). 21. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, 1-2. 22. Wolff demonstrates the process by which Western Europe came to invent Eastern Europe as its "complementary other half" during the Enlightenment and shows how Russia and other Eastern European spaces were designated as backward "shadowed

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lands," developmentally located somewhere between civilization and barbarism (Inventing Eastern Europe, 4-5, 13). 23. This overview of the "four stages theory" is drawn from Meek's classic study Social Science and the Ignoble Savage and from Johnson's dissertation "Nomads and Nomadologies: Transformations of the Primitive in Twentieth-Century Theory and Culture." 24. A common interpretation of the Biblical story of Cain (the farmer) and Abel (the shepherd) posits that the conflict between the brothers is symbolic of the competition between pastoral and sedentary groups at a time when an agricultural way of life began to displace the nomadic (Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament, 137, 213--4). 25. "Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History," Political Writings, 230. Emph. original. 26. Cohen, Kant and the Human Sciences, 125. 27. Kulisz, "Non-representation of the Wild," 23. Emph. original. 28. As Johnson notes, primitive man has been, and still is, conceived of as allochronic, or as "a man out of time." He is not seen to exist in the same temporaliry as the civilized world ("Nomads and Nomadologies," 38). 29. As Tolz demonstrates, Russian space was not clearly delineated in imperial and national terms in the national imagination. Russia's vast imperial holdings were not perceived as distinct from a Russian homeland or nation-state; rather, the "entire multi-ethnic tsarist empire was the Russian nation-state" (Russia, 16). Conceiving of the empire as the nation-state writ large necessarily complicated any attempt to demarcate the nation/homeland in geographical or other, more figurative, terms. 30. This discussion of Romanticism is indebted to Abrams's Natural Supernaturalism and Mario Praz's classic 1he Romantic Agony. 31. Overview drawn from Anderson's study of the legend in folklore and literature,

1he Legend ofthe Wandering Jew. 32. I am indebted to Malek for this list, taken from her examination of the symbol in Russian Romantic poetry in "Legenda o Ahaswerze w tw6rczej interpretacji rosyjskich romanryk6w." I would also note here that the idea that Jewishness might serve symbolically as an expression of dilemmas of alienation and belonging was recently given new voice in Slezkine's 1he Jewish Century. He makes the case for understanding modernity itself (capitalism, mobility) as metaphorically Jewish. 33. Janowitz suggests that Romantic literature draws a distinction between the Wandering Jew, an existential symbol of the alienated individual, and the Gypsies, often treated as less sympathetic markers of the pre-modern or pre-industrial ('"Wild outcasts of society,"' 213--4). 34. Trumpener, "The Time of the Gypsies," 861, 865. 35. As the title of Greenleaf and Moeller-Sally's classic study of Russian literature of the Romantic era suggests, subjecthood was a crucial aspect of Russian Romanticism. See Russian Subjects: Empire, Nation, and the Culture ofthe Golden Age. 36. Ginzburg also discusses the link between national identity and the Romantic persona in O lirike. Gukovskii treats this subject in Pushkin i russkie romantiki as well. 37. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 261.

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38. Ginzburg, "O probleme narodnosti," 52, 59. 39. Ibid., 74-5. 40. See "The Decembrist in Daily Life (Everyday Behavior as a HistoricalPsychological Category)." For a discussion of the broader Romantic context in which communication was regarded as action, see Esterhammer's lhe Romantic Pe,formative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism. 41. Buror, "Travel," 68-9. 42. Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor, xviii. 43. As Abbeele notes, "travel can only be conceptualized in terms of the points of departure and destination and of the (spatial and temporal) distance between them" (xviii).

1: Tracing the Topos of the Eternal Russian Traveler 1. Several scholars have noted that Dosroevsky's text occurs in a tradition of Russian travel writing that originated with Karamzin and Fonvizin, but they do not consider the way in which Winter Notes dismantles Karamzin's paradigm. See Frank, Dostoevsky: lhe Stir of Liberation 1860-1865, 233, and Pomerantsev, "Dostoevskii i literatura puteshestvii," 94. The narrator of Winter Notes takes pains to make his debt to Karamzin explicit: an example is his recollection ofKaramzin's failure to be impressed by the Rhine waterfall the first time he sees it. Similarly, Dostoevsky's narrator is insufficiently impressed the first time he sees the cathedral at Cologne (Pss, 1973, V:48). 2. That Karamzin's influential image of a "Russian traveler" played a significant role in shaping later Russian travelers' experience of Europe and in defining the nature of Russia's cultural relationship to Western Europe is widely known; for a discussion of the importance of Karamzin's text in this regard, see Lorman and Uspenskii's classic essay '"Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika' Karamzina i ikh mesto v razvitii russkoi kul'tury." Further, Karamzin's tremendous importance to the creation of modern Russian literature and to the shaping of a modern Russian identity in works such as Letters or History ofthe Russian State (1818-1826) should be acknowledged. He is frequently credited with initiating the Russian literary tradition as we know it today, and with positing a Russian identity predicated on the notion that Russia was a European nation with its own unique history. 3. I would note the relevance of travel writing to discussions of national identity, particularly in the Russian context. As Frank states, the travel diary "has always been one of the chief means by which Russian self-consciousness has been sharpened and affirmed" (Dostoevsky: lhe Stir ofLiberation, 234). 4. In "Dosroevskii i literatura puteshestvii," Pomerantsev argues that Karamzin's narrative pose is that of a European going to Europe; the purpose of his travels is not to see anything new, but rather to verify that which he already knows (93). I would argue, however, that Karamzin's narrative position is more complex. As Lorman and Uspenskii stress in their commentary "'Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika' Karamzina," Karamzin adopts a dialogic identity throughout the text of Letters. To his Russian

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readers, he is a cosmopolitan European traveler, culturally at home in Europe. To his European interlocutors, however, Karamzin is a somewhat exotic Russian visitor. The important point here is that Karamzin successfully negotiates both aspects of this identity. Pomerantsev further argues that Dostoevsky adopts the pose of a "European going to Europe" in Winter Notes in order to mock Karamzin's Sentimentalism, but stresses that Dostoevsky's narrator is really "Russian, only Russian." I would argue, however, that the problem for Dostoevsky's narrator is that he is not Russian enough. I submit that Dostoevsky's references to Karamzin are part of a larger statement about the problematic, unresolved nature of Russian identity, an identity which, as I will show, is informed and complicated in both Karamzin's and Dostoevsky's texts by the tradition of travel to, and writing about, Western Europe. 5. As many contemporary readers were aware, Karamzin's letters were staged. The text was composed after his return from Europe and drew heavily from other travel accounts and scholarly sources as well as from Karamzin's personal observations (Dickinson, Breaking Ground, 108). Such "borrowing" was a common feature of travel writing at the time. 6. Karamzin is not the only traveling Russian writer of the period to engage in a Sentimental approach to departure. Writers such as Vladimir Izmailov in his 1800 Puteshestvie v poludennuiu Rossiiu and P. I. Shalikov in his 1803 Puteshestvie v Malorossiiu exploited the "pleasurable sadness" of departure from an intimate circle to serve as an ostensible motivation for writing an account of their travels, though not nearly to the degree found in Letters. 7. The rupture evoked here is echoed on a stylistic level by the frequent appearance of dashes, ellipses, and breaks in the first several paragraphs. Such devices are common in Sentimental literature where, as markers of the absence of words or speech, they are meant to convey the difficulty of expressing feelings that are beyond words (see Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction, on the characteristics of Sentimental literature). Such stylistic devices mark heightened emotion for Karamzin generally, but there is an especially high preponderance of them in the first two letters relative to the frequency of their appearance in the rest of the text. 8. Dedication to themes of friendship and sadness would have made the theme of departure an attractive one for Karamzin as a Sentimental writer, but his physical departure forms such a significant component of the first part of Letters that it should not be dismissed as a Sentimental trope. In comparison, Sterne devotes all of ten lines to his leave-taking in A Sentimental journey through France and Italy. 9. Letters, 21. 10. I am grateful to Hammarberg for her insightful comment that anticipation is an element of the narrator's emotional state. 11. As discussed in the Introduction, Abbeele theorizes that consciousness of home is possible only through departure (Travel as Metaphor, xviii). 12. Letters, 21. 13. Ibid., 21. 14. Ibid., 22. Emph. mine.

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15. Though not far from the capital, Riga represented the western edge of the Russian empire at the time Karamzin traveled. It is of interest to note that this departure by land might not have occurred had Karamzin been able to obtain permission to depart from Saint Petersburg by ship for Germany, as he claims to have attempted to do while in Saint Petersburg. Unable or unwilling to spend the time waiting for a new passport, Karamzin reveals that departure from Russia is a complex process, whether in geographical or bureaucratic terms. 16. Letters, 24. 17. The description of the trials he faces while crossing out of Narva finds an interesting echo in Karamzin's earlier mention of an attempt to write a story about leaving for abroad. He explains that he began writing an autobiographical novel in which he would travel in his imagination to just those places where he is traveling now. In the "imaginary" or literary version of his travels, the weather is terrible on the night he crosses out of Russia. The narrator explains that he burned this story at home in Moscow before leaving, fearing that it would unduly color his real journey (Pis'ma, 11-2). Of course, Karamzin's "real" crossing shares certain characteristics with this earlier, imagined one, so it seems that prior imaginings have indeed colored his experience. Karamzin's travels were heavily influenced by literary expectations, but such an explicit statement as to how the author himself engendered those expectations is rare. The episode further suggests that Karamzin felt that departure from Russia should be perceived as a heightened or stormy emotional experience. 18. Pis'ma, 9. 19. In his conversation with two German travelers in Courland, Karamzin refers to Riga as a border town or pogranichnyi gorod (Pis'ma, 12). The space of what might be called homeland Russia, or the nation-state formed from those areas traditionally deemed the principalities of Rus', loosely consists of the Russian-speaking territory east of the Baltics and west of the Urals. The term denotes the ancient Kievan and Muscovite states and is connected to these "pre-imperial principalities," as well as to the language and the people (Hosking, Russia, xix). 20. Letters, 28. 21. He comments on the ways that his surroundings are gradually becoming less Russian and more German (ibid., 8-10). 22. For Karamzin, distance from his friends means that he is already in foreign lands: "Dear friends! [ ... ] I have not yet even left Russia and have already been long in foreign parts because we have been parted for a long time" (Letters, 28). 23. Ibid., 29. Emph. mine. 24. As will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4, home and homeland can be defined as both complementary and opposite concepts. Home is essentially private and belongs to the individual, while homeland is collective and public. Home can be a concrete entity, a house, but the homeland is as much an "imagined community" as it is a real place (Hobsbawm, "Introduction," 67-8). 25. Cross notes that Karamzin enjoyed visiting tombs and monuments during his travels, in part because his Sentimental attitude coward death was "as something to be

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welcomed rather than feared" (85). Letters ofa Russian Traveler is not the only Karamzinian text in which the ocean is linked to death. The narrator of the 1794 tale "The Island of Bornholm" (" Ostrov Bornhol'm") is the same Russian traveler of Letters, reflecting in later years on certain previously unnarrated events of his return journey. In the initial part of this story of forbidden love, the narrator leaves England for Russia by sea. He dwells at length on the morbid nature of the sea; its infinite expanse (bespredel'noe more) and gloomy sound (unylyi shum) evoke a funereal mood. Hammarberg notes the "Gothic aesthetics of horror" cultivated by Karamzin's association of the sea with death (From the Idyll to the Novel, 187). (For discussion of the popularity of Gothic novels in Russia in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century period, see Vatsuro's "Goticheskii roman v Rossii [1790-1840]: fragmenty iz knigi" and "lz istorii 'goticheskogo romana' v Rossii (A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinskii].") As with Karamzin's earlier description of burning the first literary version of his departure, "Ostrov Bornhol'm" operates as an alternate version of his return to Russia, albeit written long afrer his real return. In both versions, return is colored by a description of a particular kind of tragedy: separated lovers who cannot return to each other, or failed reunion. Despite the generic Gothic association of the sea with death, then, I would maintain that this morbid fear of failure to return has special meaning to Karamzin's travel text. 26. Letters, 453. 27. Ibid., 455. 28. Ibid., 453-4. The choice of the word otechestvo (fatherland) here is a telling one. As Greenfeld notes, the term only entered the Russian language in 1708 in a Perrine address. It was more frequently used during Catherine's reign, when it took on the connotations of the French term la patrie, or nation. At the turn of the century and later, it would come to signify the Romantic idea of the nation as an ethnic and territorial homeland (Nationalism, 195-6, 202). Karamzin's use of otechestvo at this important point in Letters is a seminal moment, pointing to the word's acquisition of emotional and historical resonance in addition to its previous political meaning. 29. Letters, 456. 30. It is interesting to note that Karamzin's friends and acquaintances perceived him as changed by his travels. Kahn notes that Karamzin was anecdotally described as "Europeanized," artificial in manner, and distant toward old friends after his return ("Nikolai Karamzin's Discourses of Enlightenment," 463). 31. Letters, 456. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. Emph. original. Thanks are due too Hammarberg for pointing out the correct translation of kitaiskie teni, a reference to the Chinese shadow theater in Paris. 34. Onegin returns to Moscow at the end of the novel, but fails to resolve the romantic plot begun with Tatiana. His future is uncertain; what is clear is that he has not found a place in the bosom of a family. 35. The text of Winter Notes was published in the February 1863 issue of Vremia. 36. Schonle, Authenticity and Fiction, 5-6. 37. Boundaries and borders represent a system of ordering; they contain ideas and entities such as nations and regions, and separate these same entities from others. In so

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Notes to Pages 37-40

doing, they also create entities. They mark ends and beginnings, and establish distinctions and categories. The fact that both Karamzin's and Dostoevsky's texts bring up borders to such an extent encourages the thought that geographical borders were understood to be of importance in defining various forms of identity. 38. This concern over the perceived loss of a "true" or native Russian identity dates back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries at least, and the debate over the value of Peter the Great's reforms. See Rogger's National Consciousness in Eighteenth Century Russia for a seminal discussion of the conflicted nature of Russian national consciousness. 39. In the 1860s, Dostoevsky and others articulated a desire to return to their Russian "native soil." Educated or Europeanized Russians were seen as separated from their roots in the narod. Frank provides a concise discussion of the Pochvennichestvo ("native soil") movement in Dostoevsky: lhe Stir ofLiberation, 34-47. 40. In his comparison of Dostoevsky and Chaadaev, Aizlewood argues that Dostoevsky writes "from a distance of return" in Winter Notes ("To Europe and Back," 126). Aizlewood points to the way in which progress or movement forward is defined in the text as a "return" to an idealized native Russia (128). I would argue that the alienated Russian personified by the narrator has difficulty attaining this return, however. 41. As the narrator comments, he did not travel, nor did he see things, in an orderly fashion: "you no doubt know that I have nothing in particular to relate and even less to properly write because I saw nothing properly myself, and what I did see I had no time to examine" (Winter Notes, 1). 42. Ibid., 26-7. Emph. added. 43. Dostoevsky is not alone in confusing the geopolitical border with the boundaries of cultural differentiation. The borders that demarcated Eastern Europe from its western counterparts have been notoriously malleable. In Inventing Eastern Europe, Wolff details the ever-evolving Western perception of "Eastern Europe" as a political, geographical, and cultural space that exists as a mirror reflection of the West and whose limits are difficult to determine (134). 44. Winter Notes, 2. Emph. added. Dostoevsky is not the first ill traveler, though he is perhaps the first motion-sick one. The reader might also recall Yorick's description of Smelfungus (Tobias Smollett) as a "jaundiced traveler" who observes Europe in a sickly, negative fashion in A Sentimental journey. Karamzin suffers from seasickness ("morskaia bolezn") in "Ostrov Bornhol'm," but Dostoevsky's ill traveler most forcefully recalls the underground man. 45. Frank cites Jakobson, among others, in noting the great similarity of Russian reaction to France over three centuries. Likely originating with Fonvizin, and continued by writers such as Herzen (an important influence on Dostoevsky at the time of writing Winter Notes), French society in the view of certain Russian writers was materialistic, bourgeois, and inauthentic (lhe Stir of Liberation, 234, n.2). Dostoevsky's critique fits with this negative view-his failure to see Paris is an attack on a Russian tradition of adulation of the French, and the city of Paris in particular. 46. Winter Notes, 35.

Notes to Pages 40-44

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47.Lette~,249,253. 48. Winter Notes, 42. 49. I would note that England is also treated critically by the narrator, but in somewhat different terms than France. Yet the comparison is revealing. English society is presented not as false, but as the antithesis of true domesticity. In England, Dostoevsky discovers exploited workers, mass drunkenness, and child prostitution, in other words, a society that displays the very opposite of communality. It does not care for its own, despite its much-vaunted domestic skills. Even as early as Letters, Karamzin emphasizes a similar ambiguity in English culture, praising English homeyness, yet pointing out the high prevalence of suicide (from spleen, as he describes it) among the English aristocracy. Karamzin also notes the alienating nature of English social institutions, such as the insane asylum and the debtor's prison. Both writers react to what they perceive as the deliberate and self-conscious organization of English society. Goncharov described England in similar terms as well. 50. Dostoevsky, Pss, V:67. 51. Winter Notes, 43. 52. As Lotman and Uspenskii have pointed out, Karamzin was much influenced by the idea, suggested to him in a letter by the Swiss philosopher Lavater, that one can only see oneself in a mirror, or in another's eyes. They suggest that Karamzin's travels were partly motivated by the desire to understand himself and his country through the "mirror" of Europe (530). As Kahn notes, however, Karamzin's narrator does not explicitly consider his own identity nor that of his homeland at great length in Letters

(464-5). 53. Winter Notes, 14. 54. Jonathan Culler notes the importance of the illusion of authenticity to tourism and travel (Framing the Sign, 160-1). The search for an authentic other can be understood as a premise of the phenomenon both of travel and travel writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 55. Dostoevsky, Pss, V:46. Such a desire is noted by Karamzin and Herzen as well-arguably, the wish to travel to Europe is a distinctive feature of an educated Russian childhood. 56. Frank notes that a "rhetoric of inverted irony" stylistically informs Winter Notes (lhe Stir ofLiberation, 247). 57. The tension between experience and fiction is a dominant concern of the travel writing genre. Without the presumption of veracity, the genre does not hold together; at the same time, this presumption cannot ever be understood to be fully true, or the text could not exist as a written document. For a comprehensive discussion of the role of authenticity in Russian travel writing of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, see Schonle's Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary journey. For a more general discussion of lying and plagiarism in European travel writing, see Adams's Travelers and Travel Liars: 1660-1800 (1980). 58. Winter Notes, 21. 59. Ibid., 60.

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Notes to Pages 44-51

60. Ibid., 22. 61. The "third space" colonial identity articulated by Bhabha in The Location of Culture will form an important component of the discussion ofHerzen's and Dostoevsky's treatment of"Russian Europe" in Chapter 5. 62. The narrator of Winter Notes claims that Russians traveling in Europe bear a striking resemblance to "unhappy little dogs who run about after having lost their master" (Winter Notes, 63).

2: Chaadaev's Wayward Russia 1. See, for example, Walicki's "The Paradox of Chaadaev" (1989), Peterson's "Civilizing the Race: Chaadaev and the Paradox of Eurocentric Nationalism" (1997), and Kamenskii's "Paradoksy Chaadaeva" (1991). 2. Walicki, "The Paradox of Chaadaev," 83; Peterson, "Civilizing the Race," 550. 3. The religious-historical significance of Chaadaev's philosophy has been considered in depth by Gershenzon, Shakhovskoi, Zenkovskii, Tarasov, McNally, and Walicki. Walicki contextualizes the origins and content of Chaadaev's philosophical thought as the future basis for both Slavophile and Westernizer positions. Scholars such as Gershenzon and McNally have written extensively on Chaadaev's conceptualization of Christianity and universal harmony. 4. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 12. 5. See Lotman's seminal "The Decembrist in Daily Life" for a discussion of the Decembrists' emphasis on politically significant behavior in all aspects of life. 6. See Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, 83-117. 7. This overview of German Romantic nationalism draws from Greenfeld's Nationalism, Malia's Russia under Western Eyes, and Walicki, "The Paradox of Chaadaev." 8. Gish notes that wandering (Wandern) had become a "national pastime" by the latter half of the nineteenth century in Germany ("Wanderlust and Wanderlied," 226). On this topic, see also Cusack, The Wanderer in Nineteenth-Century German Literature. 9. Wolff's Inventing Eastern Europe offers a characterization of these views. 10. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 197-252. 11. "Cette espece de vegetation morale qui conduit graduellement !es nations de la barbarie ala civilisation, a ete suspendue chez vous, et pour ainsi dire coupee par deux grands evenements: le schisme du dixieme siecle et !'invasion des Tartares" (Lettres et Opuscules Inedits, 286). Trans. mine. The nomadic characterization of Russia would be picked up again by de Custine-this time from Chaadaev-in his description of Russia from 1839. 12. 'Tantipathie originelle de Constantinople contre Rome; les crimes et le delire du Bas-Empire; l'inconcevable frenesie qui s'empara de !'Occident vers le dixieme siecle [... ] !'invasion des Tartares [... ] le funeste mur de separation definitivement eleve pendant le onzieme et le douzieme siecle: toutes ces causes, dis-je, durent necessairement soustraire la Russie au mouvement general de civilisation[ ... ]" (Quatres chapitres inedits sur la Russie, 13-4). Trans. mine.

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13. As Tolz notes, the notion of Russia's vastness was a central feature of Russian national discourse from the eighteenth century on (Russia, 159). From this time, Russia lacked clearly defined borders due to its continuous imperial expansion, and Russians failed to draw a distinction between the empire and the nation-state (16). It was impossible to define the contours of a Russian homeland in such a context (162--4). Vastness was treated as a source of pride in national discourse to some extent, but it also made the issue of national definition deeply problematic, as Chaadaev's Letter demonstrates in a striking manner. 14. See Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, pp. 201-52, esp. pp. 217-37 on the "circuitous journey" in Romantic philosophy and Hegel's Phenomenology ofthe Spirit ( 1807). 15. Emph. added. Chaadaev, Pss, 1:320. All trans. mine unless otherwise noted. 16. McNally, 1he Major Works ofPeter Chaadaev, 28. 17. Chaadaev, Pss, 1:323--4. 18. Chaadaev, Sochineniia, 78. 19. "IIoeMOTpHTe B0Kpyr eefo1. Bee KaK 6y.n:m Ha xo.n:y. Mr,r Bee KaK 6y.n:m eTpaHHHKH" (ibid., 508), emph. mine. Compare again to the contemporary Russian translation, which is closer to the French: "B3DUIHHTe B0Kpyr. Pa3Be qTo-Htt6y,n:r, eTOHT rrpoqHo? Mmrrno eKa3aTb, qm Beeb MHp B ,n:BmKeHMM" (Chaadaev, Pss, 1991, 323). "Look around. Does anything really stand firmly? It is possible to say that the whole world is in motion." Trans. mine. 20. "It is also said that the public was extremely offended by some expressions in my letter, and this is very possible; strange all the same that compositions are read and reread for many years in the original, where each thought is expressed in an incomparably stronger manner, and never is anyone offended, but everyone is shocked by a weak translation" (McNally, Friends, 38-9). 21. "Ce que vous avez de bon est evident. Yous etes bons, humains, hospitaliers, spirituels, intrepides, entreprenams, heureux imitateurs, nullement pedants, ennemis de tout gene, preferam une bataille rangee a un exercice, etc., etc. Ace beau corps sont attaches deux fistules qui I' appauvrissent: l'instabilite et l'infidelire. Tout change chez vous, mon prince: les lois comme les rubans, les opinions comme les gilets, les systemes de tout genre comme les modes; on vend sa maison comme son cheval: rien n' est constant que t inconstance, et rien n' est respecte, parce que rien n' est ancien [... ]" (de Maistre, Lettres et Opuscules lnedits, 367-8). Trans. mine. Emph. added. 22. "Les Russes sont encore une peuple nomade, au moins d'inclination, et !es maisons de Moscou n' etaient que le chariots des Scythes done on avait ore !es roues. Aussi !es Russes ont un singulier penchant a varier la distribution et I' ameublement de leurs maisons; on dirait que, ne pouvant les changer de place, ils y changent tout ce qu'ils peuveni' (de Bonald, Pensees, 3). Trans. and emph. mine. 23. McNally, Chaadaev and His Friends, 190-1. 24. McNally, 1he Major Works ofPeter Chaadaev, 34. 25. Chaadaev, Pss, 1:325. 26. Ibid., 326. 27. Ibid., 328. Emph. added.

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Notes to Pages 58-63

28. The original French describes Russians' failed ideas as "steriles eblouissements" (sterile dazzlements, or flashes in the pan). The passage does, however, stress the notions of loss and ruin. The man with no sense of a past finds himself "lost in the world" ("ii se trouve egare clans le monde") and such "lost" or "ruined" people (perdus) are found in every country, while in Russia this is a general trait (Chaadaev, Sochineniia, 82). The first Russian translation that appeared in the Telescope provides "besplodnye prizraki" ["fruitless specters" or "fruitless visions"] for "steriles eblouissements" and asserts that the man without a past wanders, or loses his way in the world ("zabluzhdaetsia v mire") (Sochineniia, 512). 29. Ibid., 328. Emph. added. 30. McNally, The Major Works ofPeter Chaadaev, 35. 31. McNally notes Chaadaev's acquaintance with Hegelian philosophy in translation prior to the publication of the Letter in 1836, but he argues that Chaadaev rejected Hegel's thought (Chaadayev and His Friends, 190-2). It seems clear, however, that Chaadaev's engagement with Hegelianism bears further exploration. 32. Aizlewood also notes a connection between Chaadaev and Dostoevsky in relation to Winter Notes on Summer Impressions in "To Europe and Back: Chaadaev and Dostoevsky." He considers Dostoevsky's stance of positive "return to Russia" in Winter Notes to be a deliberate rejection of Chaadaev's articulation of dismay over Russia's perceived estrangement from Europe in the First Philosophical Letter. 33. Lednicki, Russia, Poland, and the West, 27. 34. Ibid., 35. 35. Budgen, "Pushkin and Chaadaev," 11. 36. See Lotman's "The Decembrist in Daily Life." 37. Shakhovskoi, "Filosoficheskie pis'ma," 1-2. 38. Unless otherwise noted, biographical information derives from McNally, Chaadayev and His Friends, and Chaadaev, Pss. 39. The family kept this document in a cellar until after Nicholas I's death (Peterson, "Civilizing the Race," 556). 40. Other scholars have noted that Chaadaev's orphanhood and family history placed him outside the mainstream of Russian society. For example, see Peterson, "Civilizing the Race," 3-4. 41. See, for example, Budgen, "Pushkin and Chaadaev: The History of a Friendship"; Maikl'son, "Pushkin i Chaadaev: vstrecha v Krymu"; Tempest, "The Young Pushkin and Chaadaev"; Katz, "The Raven's Eye: Pushkin and Chaadaev"; Skakovskii, "Pushkin i Chaadaev"; Pugachev, "Onegin-dekabrist iii Onegin-'Chaadaevets?' K sporam o X glave 'Evgeniia Onegina'" and "Pushkin i Chaadaev"; and, finally, Gershenzon, "Chaadaev i Pushkin." 42. Tarasov, 'V plenu korotkomysliia," 5. 43. In his later career, Chaadaev wrote several letters, nominally addressed to an acquaintance such as Viazemskii or A. I. Turgenev, that were never delivered to their addressee. Instead, they were copied by hand and circulated in society (McNally, "Chaadaev's Letters to Viazemsky," 76-83).

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44. Pss, II:14-5. 45. Gershenzon, Chaadaev: zhizn' i myshleniia, 22-3. 46. Ibid., 14. 47. Chaadaev, Pss, II:14. 48. Lotman, "The Decembrist in Daily Life," 117. Tempest disagrees with Lotman's interpretation, arguing that Chaadaev had already been planning to resign before his meeting with the Tsar and the incident with the letter ("The Secret ofTroppau," 313-5). 49. It should be noted here that one legend of the time explained Chaadaev's discharge as a result of his tardy arrival to the meeting at Troppau because of excessive personal vanity (Lotman, "The Decembrist in Daily Life," 116-9). While this seems unlikely, it does point to Chaadaev's reputation as a dandy. 50. For example, Budgen refers to Pushkin's poem "To Chaadaev" as a "political friendly letter," signifying that the friendly letter was both elevated in form (i.e., poetic) and capable of playing a role in public debate ("Pushkin and Chaadaev," 14). See also Todd's lhe Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in the Age of Pushkin for a seminal examination of the genre. 51. In 1825 he met the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling at Carlsbad, with whom he would exchange letters on the nature of religion and history in the 1830s and 40s. Following a precedent established by Karamzin, Chaadaev traveled to see Europe more as an intellectual than as a tourist. For a brief description of Chaadaev's time abroad, see Gershenzon, Chaadaev, 28-30. Until the 1930s, it had been supposed that Chaadaev underwent a spiritual crisis during his time abroad, a supposition based largely on what was assumed to be Chaadaev's travel journal. Upon analysis, the Soviet scholar Shakhovskoi was able to prove that the strangely written spiritual journal was kept by the mystic Obleukhov, a friend and contemporary of Chaadaev's. See Andreev, '"Misticheskii' drug Chaadaeva," 103-4. 52. Budgen, "Pushkin and Chaadaev," 22. 53. A Russian translation was prepared for the journal, as the editor's note that accompanied the Letter reveals (Chaadaev, Sochineniia, 505). The Letters had previously circulated only in French. 54. McNally suggests otherwise, that Chaadaev was well aware of the Letter's upcoming publication and considered it an "act of Providence." Immediately after publication, he sent offprints to several friends, including Pushkin (Friends, 31). 55. Chaadaev, Pss, II:325. Pushkin and Chaadaev exchanged letters about Chaadaev's manuscript between 1829 and 1831. Pushkin did not share Chaadaev's views of Russia, and he wrote to Chaadaev in a tone of mild criticism, stating that Chaadaev's idea of history was "new" to him and that he could not agree with it (ibid., II:448). Pushkin would write an even more critical response in 1836, when the first Letter appeared in print, but this response was not delivered to Chaadaev until after Pushkin's death. Others of Chaadaev's circle were acquainted with the manuscript as well, A. I. Turgenev and Viazemskii among them. Turgenev also composed a reaction to the Letter when it appeared in print, but, like Pushkin, did not publish it since mention of either Chaadaev or the Philosophical Letter was forbidden in the press.

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Notes to Pages 67-8

56. Incl. in Gershenzon, Chaadaev, 148. Trans. mine. 57. The Minister of Education, Count Uvarov, prepared a report on the matter of the Letter's publication for the Tsar. Nicholas I wrote on the report itself: "Having read the article, I find that its contents are a mixture of impertinent absurdities worthy of a lunatic ... " (incl. in McNally, Friends, 35). Additionally, the Tsar penned the words "very good" on Count Benckendorffs official note to the governor-general of Moscow concerning the procedures, medical and otherwise, to be taken with Chaadaev (Friends, 35-6). The publication ban was upheld into the twentieth century. An incomplete edition of Chaadaev's works (Letters I, VI, and VII) was published in Paris in 1862 by Prince Ivan Gagarin, and was reissued by Gershenzon in Russia in 1913. Gershenzon provided an influential early biography of Chaadaev, based on those materials available to him, in 1908. The Soviet scholar D. Shakhovskoi, distantly related to Chaadaev, discovered the remaining five letters in the 1930s and published them in Russian translation in 1935. A "selective volume" of Chaadaev's works appeared in the USSR in 1987 and a collection of his writing in 1989. A full Russian scholarly edition of Chaadaev's collected works was published only in 1991. 58. Publication of the Philosophical Letter was predated by another epistolary episode that directly involved the Tsar. In 1833, Chaadaev wrote to Benckendorff with a request to rejoin government service in the prestigious diplomatic corps. Chaadaev suggested that he might be suitably employed in monitoring the progress of current intellectual thought in Germany. In an official reply, Benckendorff and the Tsar informed Chaadaev that he might rejoin the service, but in the less prestigious Ministry of Finance. Chaadaev then pointedly replied to the Tsar in French, claiming he did not know his native language well enough for such a position, a fact he considered the fault of the poor state of the Russian educational system. Benckendorff returned this letter to Chaadaev, noting in the reply that he had not shown it to the Tsar, who would certainly have taken offense at its bold tone. Chaadaev resent the letter, this time with a further explanation of the ills of the Russian educational system. Neither Benckendorff nor the Tsar replied to this last epistle, and Chaadaev did not accept any government position. Correspondence included in Pss, Il:80-6, 449. 59. Budgen, "Pushkin and Chaadaev," 7-8. 60. Esterhammer, The Romantic Performative, 5, 9. 61. Notably, this is a view that would be echoed later in Derrida's notion of "fabulous retroactivity." Ibid., 18. 62. The editor's note that accompanied Chaadaev's Letter in the Telescope is worthy of mention. Appearing at the bottom of the first page, it drew attention to the essay and appeared to legitimate the article's claims, stating: "These letters have been written by one of our countrymen. The set constitutes a whole, imbued with one spirit and developing one principal idea. The loftiness of the subject, the breadth and depth of views, the strong consistency of the conclusions reached, and the energetic sincerity of expression give it a special claim on the attention of thinking readers .. .It is with pleasure that we inform our readers that we have permission to enhance our journal with other letters from this set" (Sochineniia, 1989, 505). The editorial comments suggest the importance of the Letter's

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appearance as a publication event in the journal, worthy of readers' special attention, and supported by its official editorial apparatus. 63. As Esterhammer shows, German Idealists such as Kant and Schelling et al. were concerned with the constitutive power oflanguage, and they frequently framed "the dialectic of subject and object [... ] in linguistic terms." For example, Schelling "evokes the act of saying 'I am' or 'it is"' in establishing that 'T' exists. This is linked more broadly to Idealism's concept of "being-as-activity" (1he Romantic Performative, 97). Given Schelling's importance to Chaadaev (Chaadaev owned copies of all of his works, met him in person in 1825, and corresponded with him several times), it is worth considering how Idealist notions of speech as action informs both the writing of Chaadaev's Philosophical Letter and the scandal surrounding its publication. 64. See, for example, Gershenzon, Chaadaev, 165. 65. Thaler, "Introduction," A journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, 11-2. 66. Radishchev, A journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, 239. 67. Ibid., 239, 244-5. 68. Ibid., 201. 69. Ibid., 8-9. 70. Tolz, Russia, 16. 71. Gertsen, Ss, 1954-65, IX:142-3. 72. See Esterhammer's 1he Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism for discussion of Romantic philosophies of language and speech. 73. Walicki comments on Chaadaev's emphasis on social and religious hierarchy and on the submission of the individual to a larger social order ( 1he Slavophile Controversy, 87-9). 74. Chaadaev, Pss, Il:305-6. Trans. mine. 75. Shcheglova makes the point that Chaadaev's bachelordom has been interpreted as deliberate and egotistical (Sud'by rossiiskogo samopoznaniia, 18-9). There is evidence that contemporaries also saw Chaadaev's lack of domestic relations as mysterious (Chaadaev, Pss, II:318-9). While one hesitates to read Chaadaev's apparent abstinence from romantic entanglements as entirely political, the consistency of his conduct is suggestive of a Romantic code in which, as Lorman notes, "unity of behavior" was a fundamental principle ("The Decembrist in Daily Life,"104). 76. For a summary of contemporary recollections of Chaadaev, see Budgen, "Pushkin and Chaadaev," 10-11; and Gershenzon's Chaadaev, which contains extensive material from Chaadaev's contemporaries. In as much as Chaadaev presented a persona to a receptive public, one must also keep in mind that public's sensibilities, i.e., the fashion for understanding persona as a consistent and legible entity. This played a role in shaping public perceptions of his character. I would note here some of the Byronic behavioral paradigms that lay behind Chaadaev's persona: Byron was known for his "sarcastic, haughty expression" and was obsessed with genealogy and his family's origins (MacCarthy, Byron, 519). Byron performed a grand, if doomed, political gesture in 1824 (not long before the Decembrist Revolt) with his journey co Greece and role

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in the Greek war of independence, where he died. Like Chaadaev's behavior, Byron's involvement in the Greek uprising was interpreted by many as an act of pure theater. Support for this interpretation could be found in his notorious scarlet and gold uniform, specially commissioned Homeric helmet, and personal retinue consisting of a troop of Suliote guards and a strikingly handsome young Greek page with whom Byron was infatuated. 77. The sample is Gershenzon's, culled from the numerous descriptions by contemporaries that he collected ( Chaadaev, 122). Compare also with Longinov's assertion of Chaadaev's elegance: "This elegance in everything was necessary for the role, original and difficult, which he was fated to play in society, paying so much attention to his appearance" (ibid., 188). Both trans. mine. 78. Herzen, My Past and 1houghts, II:265. 79. Mandel'shtam, "Petr Chaadaev," 401. Trans. mine. 80. Evidence of Chaadaev's nickname for Turgenev can be found in his letters as early as 1820 (Chaadaev, Pss, II:10, 534). Shcheglova notes Chaadaev's habit of referring to Turgenev as the Wandering Jew, and she associates this symbol directly with Chaadaev, subtitling a section of her monograph "The Image of'Melancholy Ahasuerus"' ("Oblik 'melankholicheskogo Agasfera'") in reference to his persona. Here she quotes a contemporary description in which Chaadaev is likened to the Wandering Jew himself: "The dusty wrinkles of Ahasuerus show on his face, and his eye looks with the weighty wisdom of a millennium, as if he had lived through all ages" (Sud'by rossiiskogo samopoznaniia, 29). Unfortunately, she does not provide a source for this quotation. 81. Chaadaev lived in a wing of the Levashev family home from 1833 until his death in 1856 (McNally, Chaadaev and His Friends, 26-7). 82. Pushkin also bequeaths his inkwell to Chaadaev in the 1821 "To my inkwell" ("K moei chernilitse"). 83. Pushkin, Pss, 1962-66, I:346. Strikingly, this poem is from the same year as Shelley's "Ozymandias," a poem that also features the ruins of autocracy. Trans. mine. 84. Ibid., 414. Trans. mine. 85. Ibid., II:216. Trans. mine. 86. Standard commentary suggests that these "cold doubts" refer to MuravievApostol's insistence that the Temple of Diana did not stand on the same spot as the Georgievskii monastery (Pss, 1949, II:427). 87. Pushkin, Pss, 1962-66, II:216. Trans. mine. 88. Ibid. Trans. mine. 89. Tolz, Russia, 98. 90. Herzen, My Past and 1houghts, II:265. 91. Ibid., 261. 92. Ibid., 134-5. Emph. added. 93. Lotman, "The Decembrist in Daily Life," 107. 94. McNally, Major Works, 44. 95. As Tolz notes, Russian intellectuals are still trying to find the answers to Chaadaev's questions about the nature of Russian national identity (Russia, 130).

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3: A Poet Astray 1. Levitt, Russian Literary Politics, 2. 2. Greenleaf and Moeller-Sally, eds., Russian Subjects, 16-7. 3. Lorman refers to the poetic persona of the "poet-fugitive" and "poet-exile" that is apparent in the "Southern poems" (Pushkin: biografiia pisatelia, stat'i i zametki 1960-1990, 56-112). A notable exception to this oversight is Kahn's "Pushkin's Wanderer Fantasies." Kahn notes the religious importance of the wanderer figure to Pushkin, particularly in regard to the 1835 poem "Strannik," and he discusses the presence of the wanderer in Pushkin's work in connection with the idea of the Romantic individual, the fantasy of escape, and the social position of the poet. Neither Lorman nor Kahn discusses the ways in which the image of the wanderer emerges as a national symbol in Pushkin's work. 4. See Greenfeld, Nationalism, 310-71. 5. As Greenfeld stresses, the role of state or national citizen did not exist in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Russia; Russians were subjects of an imperial power. Ginzburg makes a similar point, noting that one of the Decembrists' chief aspirations was to create for themselves a Russian civil identity. Without the guarantees of participation in government and the public sphere and protection of individual rights that such citizenship provided, the formation of an identity as a private individual within the political sphere was deeply problematic. 6. On the influence of Byron's persona and writings on Pushkin, see Zhirmunskii's classic study Bairon i Pushkin: Pushkin i zapadnye literatury. 7. It bears noting here, however, that figures such as Pushkin, Chaadaev, and Herzen were also consummate insiders within the small world of the educated (liberal) Russian elite. While they wrestled with issues of personal and national identity, their social identity-as aristocrats and gentlemen-was never in question. 8. Overview drawn from Tevekelian, ed., Letopis' zhizni i tvorchestva Aleksandra Pushkina v chetyrekh tomakh, and Grossman, Pushkin. Pushkin's exile took place before Chaadaev embarked on a radical career of his own. Perhaps it served as an additional goad to Chaadaev to act in his resignation from service in 1821. 9. Debreczeny cites several examples of the influence young Russian liberals, and specifically the Decembrists, attributed to Pushkin's poetry and persona (Social Functions ofLiterature, 5-13). 10. In Distant Pleasures, Sandler argues that the experience of exile is felt in the very texture of Pushkin's narrative voice, which places its implied audience at a remove from the speaker/poet. 11. This remark appears in an 1820 letter to his publisher, N. I. Gnedich (Pushkin, Pss, 1962-66, X:20). 12. See Dickinson's, Offord's, and Schonle's recent monographs on the cultural importance of travel and travel writing in early nineteenth-century Russia. 13. Due to the leniency of his supervisors, Pushkin was able to travel relatively freely through the Caucasus and the Crimea. 14. Pushkin's time in the South is frequently referred to as his "Byronic period," and Russian readership has traditionally ascribed the title "Southern poems" to the work

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of chis period in an echo of Byron's "Eastern poems." The Southern poems are generally treated as one collection since they were written in exile between 1820 and 1824, and, with the exception of "To Ovid," can be seen as thematically and stylistically linked. Recent scholarly works of relevance to this discussion are Gasparov's Poeticheskii iazyk Pushkina kak fakt istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka, Sandler's Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing ofExile, Layton's Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy, Greenleaf and Moeller-Sally's Russian Subjects: Empire, Nation, and the Culture of the Golden Age, Ram's lhe Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics ofEmpire, and Hokanson's Writing at Russia's Border. 15. Ovid applied the term Scythian loosely to the Tomitans, the actual inhabitants ofTomis, his place of exile (Hokanson, "Barbarus hie ego sum," 67). 16. Sandler also notes Pushkin's special relationship to Ovid's dichotomy of centerperiphery and civilization-hinterland (Distant Pleasures, 49). 17. Pushkin, Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry, 48. Cf. Ovid's description of the same landscape: "Snow covers the ground; it lies there beyond sun or rain to dispel it; / Boreas makes it grow hard and almost perpetual. / When the first snow has still not been melted a second snowstorm's arriving; / Snow usually stays here in many places as long as two years" (Tristia, 76). 18. In his discussion of the messianic and mythopoetic aspects of Pushkin's work, Gasparov argues that "To Ovid" plays a special role in the development of a dialectic between the "old" and the "new" in Pushkin's poetic lexicon. Gasparov's association of Pushkin's exile with a pilgrimage or voyage points to the emphasis on travel and movement so important to the Pushkinian persona. See Poeticheskii iazyk Pushkina, especially 176-88 and 211-27, concerning the image of the meeting between two poets. 19. Pushkin, Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry, 47. Emph. added. 20. Scholars, including, in recent years, Layton, Sandler, and Hokanson, have discussed the relevance of the Orient and Orientalism in relation to Pushkin. As Layton notes, the "renaissance orientale" was a recent phenomenon in Europe, but it was more complicated in Russia, where the writer such as Pushkin was in the paradoxical position of both observer of the Orient and observed "Oriental" himself, subject to the Occidental gaze (Russian Literature and Empire, 1, 10). 21. Pushkin, Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry, 46. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 48. 24. Gasparov stresses Pushkin's meeting with Ovid's "shade" (ten'). I would add to his discussion chat "Pushkin''-a representation, or lyric persona-is also a shade in the text of"To Ovid." Further, Pushkin refers to his own shade haunting the spot after his death. 25. Hokanson's "Barbarus hie ego sum" addresses the tension of literary exile for Pushkin, who needed both to remind his readers of his absence (and the reasons for it) and to maintain, even increase, his standing with the Russian reading public. She argues that he does this by styling himself both as Ovid and as the barbarian Ovid feared (62-3). 26. Tristia opens with Ovid's statement that his letters and poems will travel to Rome, where they will serve as representations of himself, and perhaps act on his behalf:

Notes to Pages 90--95

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"Little book, I don't begrudge it; you'll go to the city without me,/ Ay, to the place where your master isn't permitted to go! / Off with you, but in disheveled dress as is proper for exiles ... " (1). See also: "May you arrive on a good day, more fortunate than your own master,/ And reach him there in his palace and lighten my evil lot" (5). 27. Layton (Russian Literature and Empire), Ram (1he Imperial Sublime, "Pushkin and the Caucasus"), and Hokanson (Writing at Russia's Border) all note the extreme importance of these poems to the phenomenon of Russian literary imperialism. 28. Notable examples of the demonic Romantic wanderer include Faust and Me/moth the Wanderer. Pushkin was acquainted with these works, and refers to Melmoth in Evgenii Onegin (Part III: stanza 12). O'Bell comments on the centrality of the image of the demonic wanderer to Onegin in her discussion of "Onegin's Journey" ("Through the Magic Crystal to Eugene Onegin," 152-70). 29. Hokanson, Writing at Russia's Border, 233. 30. Ibid., 232. Emph. added. 31. Austin makes a similar point about the frustrating nature of the Prisoner's search in "The Exotic Prisoner in Russian Romanticism," 217-74, 240-1. 32. See Layton, Russian Literature and Empire, for a discussion of the image of the Caucasus in the Russian imagination, especially pp. 89-109. 33. Pushkin commented in an 1820 letter to his brother from Kishinev: "You understand how pleasing this shadow of danger is to the dreamer's imagination." Trans. mine. 34. The motif of imprisonment was a popular theme in Romantic literature. Austin describes its Russian origins at length in "The Exotic Prisoner in Russian Romanticism." 35. See Layton, Russian Literature and Empire, 98-101, for discussion of the East as a space of sexual conquest. 36. Melmoth, the title character of Charles Maturin's popular 1820 novel Me/moth the Wanderer and an archetypal demonic wanderer, makes a bargain with the devil for immortality and is thereafter compelled to wander the world, carrying out evil deeds, such as ruining an innocent native girl in the South Seas. 37. Sandler, Distant Pleasures, 146-56, and Layton, Russian Literature and Empire, 175-211. 38. Many have sought to link the subject and tone of the epilogue to the content of the poem. Greenleaf argues that the pieces of "The Prisoner" reflect a very Romantic preoccupation with fragmentation and the juxtaposition of different discourses (Pushkin and Romantic Fashion, 45). 39. Statements such as the following: "And I will celebrate that glorious hour, / When, having felt the bloody attack, / Upon the indignant Caucasus I Our doubleheaded eagle raised itself [ ... ]" (Hokanson, Writing at Russia's Border, 249) seem to unabashedly support the imperial project. 40. Ram further suggests that the epilogue, though odic in terms of style, serves as a literary demonstration of the conquest it describes ( 1he Imperial Sublime, 187). 41. Contemporary readers saw Pushkin's work as ethnographically accurate, so his portrayal of transient Gypsy social bonds was regarded as factual (Layton, Russian Literature and Empire, 104).

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Notes to Pages 95-100

42. Pushkin, Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry, 287. 43. Ibid., 271. 44. As Hokanson notes, Ovid himself creates the trope of "an old man telling a folk version of known history" in a letter from exile, in which he tells of hearing an old man tell the story of Orestes and Pylades ("Barbarus hie ego sum," 64). 45. Trans. mine. 46. Pushkin, Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry, 273. 47. Ibid., 274. 48. Hokanson, "Barbarus hie ego sum," 67. 49. Pushkin, Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry, 268. KoqyJOT (kochuiut) derives from the infinitive KoqesaTb (kochevat'), "to be a nomad." Its figurative meanings include to roam, to wander, and to migrate. 50. Ibid., 288. 51. Pushkin had become known to the Russian reading public as the "Singer of the Caucasus" (pevets Kavkaza) and was considered to be the "idol of Romantic youth" (Lorman, Pushkin: biografiia pisatelia, 95). Lorman comments on the Romantic nature of the heroes of the Southern poems. 52. For a discussion of the ironic rone and anti- or post-Romantic bent of Pushkin's travelogue, see Tynianov's classic "O 'Puteshestvii v Arzrum."' See also Greenleaf's Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony and her "Pushkin's 'Journey to Arzrum': The Poet at the Border." Helfant has recently offered a discussion of the origins of the text in "Sculpting a Persona: The Path from Pushkin's Caucasian Journal to Puteshestvie v Arzrum." Wachtel's "Voyages of Escape, Voyages of Discovery: Transformations of the Travelogue" analyzes Pushkin's play with the genre of the non-literary travelogue and links Mandel'shtam's 1933 Puteshestvie v Armeniiu (Journey to Armenia) to the Arzrum text. Layton's Russian Literature and Empire provides an extensive discussion of Russian Orientalism useful for an understanding of the literary mode Pushkin parodies in this text. See also Schonle's Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary Journey: 1790-1840 (181-200) and Hokanson's Writing at Russia's Border (I 08-69), where she links ]ournry to Arzrum to "Onegin's Journey." 53. As Greenleaf notes, an increase in censorship, the slow progress of his courtship with Natalya Goncharova, the investigation of the poems "Gavriliada'' and "Andre Chenier," and attacks by hostile critics (Bulgarin et al.) contributed to Pushkin's feeling of oppressive stagnation at this time ("The Poet at the Border," 944). 54. Pushkin kept a journal during his travels in 1829. In 1830, he published a piece entitled "The Georgian Military Road" in the Literary Gazette that was based on these notes. Much sensitive material of a political and personal nature was edited out, however. As has been noted by many, it was customary for Orientalist travel accounts to be accompanied by an apparatus of "scientific" material, such as the treatise on the Yezidis. 55. See Greenleaf's assertion that the multiplicity of literary references in Journry to Arzrum reflects, on the one hand, Pushkin's attempt to clear a space for himself in the crowded literary space of Orientalist travel writing, and, on the other, the Orientalist

Notes to Pages I 00--103

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impulse to "people" exotic space with other travelers with whom to engage in a dialogue over the space ("The Poet at the Border," 948). 56. For a discussion of authorial circulation in "Fragments of Onegin's Journey," see Kleespies, "Superfluous Journeys," 23-32. 57. Pushkin, Pss, 1956-58, VI:639. Emph. added. Trans. mine. 58. The fact that Fontanier is in the region bespeaks the presence of a competing imperial power (Greenleaf, "The Poet at the Border," 945). 59. Tynianov, "O 'Puteshestvii v Arzrum,"' 57. 60. "Un poete distingue par son imagination a trouve dans tant de hauts faits dont il a ete temoin non le sujet d'un poeme, mais celui d'une satyre." Pushkin, Pss, 1956--58, VI:639. English translation from Helfant, "Sculpting a Persona," 373. 61. In fact, Pushkin had already received criticism for failing to praise the Russian military victory sufficiently in the first literary descriptions of his trip in 1829. As Helfant notes, the conservative writer Bulgarin had attacked Pushkin publicly in the Northern Bee in 1830 for disappointing Russian readers by failing to properly celebrate the "momentous events taking place in the East" ("Sculpting a Persona," 369). 62. Wolff, Pushkin on Literature, 382. Pushkin also emphasizes that the French author describes the Russian campaign in his own fashion: "The author. .. [gives] his personal impressions of the 1829 campaign." Emph. mine. 63. Tynianov, among others, points to the satiric nature of the foreword ("O 'Puteshestvii v Arzrum,"' 63). Pushkin's earlier publication, "The Georgian Military Road," may have confused the Russian reading public. 64. Pushkin reveals that travelers are mistaken on other counts as well, for example by showing that Sacy's assertion that the Yezidis are Devil-worshippers is false or by disproving the general claim that hermaphroditism is common to Turks and Tatars. Schonle provides a discussion of the tensions of authenticity in travel writing in Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary Journey, 1790-1840 (esp.1-16). 65. Wolff, Pushkin on Literature, 383. Emph. original. 66. Pushkin had already dealt with the complications of a writerly reputation in the 1820s when various anonymous poems were ascribed to him, some incorrectly. 67. Though the route of his 1829 travels was different, Pushkin conflates the space of the two journeys, frequently referring to his previous experience of the South, as Greenleaf notes in "The Poet at the Border" (940). 68. When Pushkin began his career as a poet, he would have known a great many of his readers, personally or at least by name. By 1829, however, the Russian reading public had expanded significantly, beyond the scope of individual acquaintance. Todd's Fiction and Society in the Age ofPushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative addresses the rapid growth of the Russian readership (esp.73-105). 69. Wolff, Pushkin on Literature, 384. Greenleaf notes the futility of Pushkin's attempt to escape "contemporaneity" ("The Poet at the Border," 953). 70. Wolff, Pushkin on Literature, 385. 71. "There I found several unknown names scratched into the brick by fameloving travelers." Pushkin, Pss, 1956-58, VI:647. Trans. mine. As Helfant points out,

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Pushkin describes carving his own name onto the rock, both in the journal on which the 1835 text is based and in "The Georgian Military Road," while his companion, Count Musin-Pushkin, carves his wife's name ("Sculpting a Persona," 372). 72. Ermolov was recalled from the Caucasus in 1827 under suspicion of ties to the Decembrists, who had admired him and even hoped that he might prove to be an ally. The description of Pushkin's conversation with Ermolov was cut from the 1829 edition of "The Georgian Military Road" as his fall from political favor meant that Ermolov was a forbidden topic (Helfant, "Sculpting a Persona," 373). 73. Wolff, Pushkin on Literature, 383. 74. Ibid,, 384. Emph. mine. 75. In his seminal study 7he Romantic Agony, Praz provides an extensive discussion of the Romantic fascination with borders, liminality, and the taboo. 76. Pushkin, Pss, 1956-58, VI:670-1. Emph. mine. Trans. mine. 77. See, for example, Greenleaf, "The Poet at the Border," 940. 78. Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor, xviii-xix. 79. Ram, "Pushkin and the Caucasus," 24-5. 80. Ram also notes a certain lineage between Arzrum and Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, as well as Brodsky's 1985 Journey to Byzantium (Puteshestvie v Stambul). All three texts share narrative strategies of "cultural blindness and interpretive failure" in their treatment of Russian travel "abroad" (ibid.). Schonle argues thatArzrum is a satiric response to Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveler (Authenticity and Fiction, 181-92,

197, 198-9). 81. These themes play out to an extreme degree in another Pushkin text, the fragments of "Onegin's Journey" that were added as an appendix to the 1833 edition of Eugene Onegin. Here "Pushkin," the narrator of the poem, and the protagonist Onegin circulate through the realms of Moscow, Saint Petersburg, the provincial estate, and the Sourh, occasionally crossing paths. Their movements have important implications regarding motifs of literary and social circulation. For further discussion of "Onegin's Journey," see Kleespies, "Superfluous Journeys," 20-32. 82. A telling example here has been noted by Greenlea£ Pushkin "penetrates" various female and other "forbidden" enclosures, such as the bathhouse, hut his presence fails to cause alarm ("The Poet at the Border," 942, 950). 83. Pushkin, Pss, 1956-58, VI:691. Emph. mine. 84. Greenleaf notes the problem of Pushkin's "illegibility'' in the South ("The Poet at the Border," 942). 85. Pushkin, Pss, 1956-58, VI:691. 86. Ibid., 685-6. Emph. mine. 87. Layton provides discussion of the way in which Orientalist discourse "feminized" peoples, cultures, and even the landscape in a show of discursive power (Russian Literature and Empire, 175-211). 88. Odysseus is an important figure in Romantic literature, given his quest to return to his point of origin and to the unity that "home" provides (Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 164).

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4: ''A Journey around the World by I. Oblomov" 1. Goncharov, Fregat "Pallada," 30. Trans. and emph. mine. 2. The account was compiled from the offical log Goncharov kept as secretary and from his letters and diaries. Several travel sketches were published between 1855 and 1857; these were collected for a revised two-volume edition in 1858 (Ehre, Oblomov and His Creator, 142). Revised editions of Frigate Pallas appeared in 1879 and 1886 (Ornatskaia, "Istoriia sozdaniia," 765). 3. Chaadaev, Pss, I:323-4. Krasnoshchekova argues that Goncharov drew on Chaadaev's philosophy of history as expressed in the Philosophical Letters in his characterization of the respective development of various societies in terms of the stages of human development: infancy, childhood, etc. (Mir tvorchestva, 172-6). To the best of my knowledge, other links have not been made between the work of the two writers. 4. I argue this elsewhere in more depth. See Kleespies, "Superfluous Journeys," 20-3, 32-42. 5. Diment, "Precocious Talent," 8. 6. As Singleton (Adams) has noted in No Place like Home, Oblomov is "symbolically homeless," and his obsession with domesticity is part of a larger concern with home and homeyness in nineteenth-century Russian literature (69-92). 7. Lounsbery notes in "The World on the Back of a Fish" that the references to Stolz's mobility, as well as to Oblomov's youthful interest in travel and travel books, ultimately serve to "underscore [Oblomov's] immobility'' (49). 8. Goncharov, Fregat "Pallada," 620. Emph. mine. Filip was the name of Goncharov's valet (Diment, 14). 9. Goncharov, Fregat ''Pallada, "628. Emph. mine. 10. The Soviet critic Engel'gardt demonstrates in his 1935 essay "Fregat Pallada" that the character of Oblomov is central to Frigate Pallas (259-61). That Frigate Pallas can in part be read as Oblomov's travelogue is further suggested by the tide of Engel'gardt's unpublished monograph on the travelogue from the 1930s entitled "A Journey around the World. By I. Oblomov" ("Puteshestvie vokrug sveta. I. Oblomova"). Ehre also notes that the narrator frequently takes on the persona of Oblomov in Frigate Pallas (Oblomov and His Creator, 148). Engel' garde, Ehre, and Krasnoshchekova likewise note the presence of the oppositional pairing of Peter and Alexander Aduev from A Common Story in the traveling narrator's persona. Goncharov himself notes the interconnected nature of his work in his 1879 essay "Better Late than Never," stating that his three novels An Ordinary Story, Oblomov, and The Precipice are "closely and logically connected" and that they are "not three books, but one" (Ss, 1952, VIII: 1401). The fact that he finished Frigate Pallas and Oblomov during the same period suggests that the travelogue is, at least in part, deeply tied to the novel. 11. As Engel' garde points out, Frigate Pallas was received by Goncharov's contemporaries as a literary work, not a factual document. This original insight was obscured by later critics' insistence on reading the text as a literal record of the Russian expedition. Goncharov began work on Oblomov at the end of the 1840s, but work was

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Notes to Pages 118-28

interrupted by his travels. Goncharov did not resume writing it until 1855, at which time he was also at work on Frigate Pallas. Oblomov appeared serially in print in Notes of the Fatherland in 1859 (Ehre, Oblomov and His Creator, 86-7). 12. Goncharov even added to later editions additional text that is narrated from the Oblomovian perspective, i.e., a passage in which he details his dislike of modern train travel (Fregat "Pallada," 539). 13. Ibid., 80. Trans. mine. 14. Goncharov, lhe Frigate Pallas, 55. 15. In Breaking Ground, Dickinson notes that travel acts as a means of placing home-rather than abroad-in sharp relief in the writing of authors such as Kiukhel'beker and Gogol (187-99). A similar paradigm is at work in Frigate Pallas. 16. Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor, xviii. 17. Ibid., xix. 18. Lukacs, lhe lheory ofthe Novel, 128. 19. Goncharov, lhe Frigate Pallas, 49. 20. See Lounsbery's "'The World on the Back of a Fish'" on the role of contemporary Russian anxiery about capitalism and the incursions of a market-based economy in Oblomov---and the way in which these concerns profoundly shape the lives of Oblomovka's inhabitants. 21. Krasnoshchekova also notes the correspondence between the description of the Russian barin and "Oblomov's Dream" (Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov, 166). 22. Goncharov, lhe Frigate Pallas, 49-50. Emph. mine. 23. In "Time after Time: The Temporal Ideology of Oblomov," Borowec has demonstrated the presence of two different temporalities in Oblomov. One is the linear, progressive time associated with Stoltz, Ol'ga, and their activities. The other is a cyclical, traditional or ancient time that marks Oblomov's sphere of existence. In Frigate Pallas a similar emphasis is placed on the contrast between repetitive, cyclical, unmeasured Russian time and progressive, linear, measured English time. 24. The Siberian frontier was popularly perceived as a potential site for Russian social renewal in the mid-nineteenth century. The absence of serfdom and presence of a more egalitarian social structure there meant that it seemed to offer, at least in part, the possibility for a "new" Russia. See Bassin, "Inventing Siberia," for discussion of Russian perceptions of Siberia. 25. The demanding Siberian portion of the journey proved to be a fitting culmination to an expedition that had been plagued by difficulties from the start. See Engel'gardt's essay "Fregat 'Pallada'" for a description of the voyage, esp. pp. 227-50. 26. See Bassin, "Inventing Siberia," and Diment and Slezkine, Between Heaven and Hell, for an overview of nineteenth-century Russian perceptions of Siberia. 27. Tolz, Russia, 16, 160-1. 28. Krasnoshchekova asserts that Goncharov's Siberia is a space of"new" Russia and that there is no oblomovshchina there ("Fregat 'Pallas,"' 28). She argues that Goncharov builds a utopia of the future in the Siberia section in which he ignores anything that does not fit his ideal (IvanAleksandrovich Goncharov, 209). Bassin likewise situates Goncharov

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as a participant in the frontier discourse of the period, stressing Goncharov's emphasis on Russia's responsibility as a civilizer of the region. For further discussion of Goncharov as a champion of a new, future-oriented Siberia, see both Krasnoshchekova, ibid., 209-10, and "Fregat 'Pallas,"' 12-31, and Bassin, ImperialVisiom, 186-90. 29. A dualistic approach is a hallmark of Goncharov's writing. As Ehre notes, the divisions between "life's differing halves ... dominate his three novels" (Oblomov and His Creator, 25), thus the seemingly opposing views of Siberia are consistent with Goncharov's writing more generally. 30. See Hobsbawm for a definition of home and homeland as both complementary and oppositional ideas. Home is the private sphere of the individual, and homeland is rhe collective and public sphere co which an individual belongs ("Introduction," 67-8). 31. In ar lease rhe case of one of the words used in Russian co indicate homeland (for which there is no exact equivalent), rhe history of rhe word is revealing. As noted in Chapter l, Otechestvo, or fatherland, was introduced in 1708 in a Perrine address. Ir initially served co stress rhe close nature of rhe relationship between the person of the tsar and the geopolitical entity governed by him. The word was more concretely developed during Catherine's reign, where it acquired the connotations of the French la patrie, or nation. Toward the rum of the nineteenth century it began to articulate the idea of a homeland in the Romantic sense of "the land and the dead" (Greenfeld, Nationalism, 195-6, 202). The final passages of Karamzin's Letters ofa Russian Traveler arguably contributed co this shifr. 32. See Greenfeld's discussion of the formation of Russian identity in the eighteenth century in Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, 191-274. 33. As Tolz notes, Russians "are still hotly debating who should be members of their national community and, more importantly, where the geographical borders of rhe Russian national homeland should be" (Russia, 7). 34. Rapport and Dawson, Migrants ofIdentity, 9. 35. Etkind argues chat Russia experienced "internal colonization" in the nineteenth century, bur he asserts that Siberia largely lay beyond the reach of rhe self-colonizing process ("Bremia brirogo cheloveka," 275). Etkind's position reflects a view in which Siberia does nor belong co national space. As I argue, however, Goncharov treats Siberia as a provincial territory, or as a form of internal colony. 36. In my discussion of Russian popular views of Siberia here and elsewhere, I am indebted to Bassin's work, especially his article "Inventing Siberia," as well as to Diment and Slezkine's volume of essays on the topic, Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of

Siberia in Russian Culture. 37. Bassin, "Inventing Siberia," 767-70. 38. Ibid., 775-8. See also Tolz on the idealization of Siberia and its recasting "as part of Russia proper" in the nineteenth century (Russia, 163-4). 39. The Russian border was expanding throughout rhe 1850s: the first Russian naval expeditions down rhe Amur River took place in 1854 and 1855 (Bassin, "The Russian Geographical Society," 247-8), and in the lace 1850s Russia annexed the Amur and Ussuri river regions from rhe Chinese (Bassin, "Inventing Siberia," 788-9). 40. Thar Russians conceived of Siberia in terms of an American-style frontier has

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been well noted. In fact, Siberia's promise of freedom was such that Russian authorities were hesitant to develop the region for fear of revolt or secession. There was even concern about a possible Siberian union with America (Bassin, "Inventing Siberia," 775). 41. For discussion of the frontier as a place where civilization ends and nature begins, where the present encounters both its primordial past and its future, see Bennington's "Frontier" (1994). 42. The uncanny is that which is at once familiar and unfamiliar. In the Freudian definition of the term, it is that which is unheimlich, or, in one sense of the word, "unhomey," a term that may be interpreted to mean both not familiar and not domestic (or intimate, familiar/familial). Associated with feelings of horror or revulsion, and not typically applied to the idea of the frontier, the notion of the uncanny, or of the potentially disturbing mix of "homey" and "un-homey," is useful, however, as a means of defining a crucial aspect of frontier space, the strange mix of familiar/domestic and unfamiliar/ wild. In "The Uncanny Frontier of Russian Identity," Sobol argues that a dynamic of the uncanny pervades Lermontov's treatment of the close and yet foreign "frontier" of coastal Ukraine in the short story "Taman." 43. Russian imperial borders were changing to the south and west as well as the east throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but annexation of this territory was not carried out with the expectation of Russian settlement or potential incorporation into national space. The Caucasus or Poland were seen not as "empty" spaces to be filled, but as peoples to be integrated into a multinational empire. See Hosking's description of Russian policies in the diverse regions of the Russian empire (Russia: People and Empire, 8-39). 44. Lounsbery identifies the phenomenon of provincialism as "symbolically central to Russian identity" ("'No, this is not the Provinces!"' 260). 45. Goncharov, Fregat "Pal/add," 550. Trans. mine. 46. A sample of the monumental mode is as follows: "Who is the titan who moves the deserts and waters? Who changes the soil and the climate? Such titans are legions of men [ ... ] landowners, clerics, merchants, immigrants-all called to labor and laboring without rest. And when such a region is ready, settled, and of cultural standing-a region formerly obscure, unknown, but now standing before the astonished world, asking to have a name and rights, then one searches for the pioneers who created this miracle, but one does not find them, no more than one found out who built the pyramids in the empty desert (The Frigate Pallas, 596-7). For a discussion of Goncharov as a champion of a new, future-oriented Siberia, see Krasnoshchekova, Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov, 209-10, and "Fregat 'Pallada,"'12-31, and also Bassin, Imperial Visions, 186-90. 47. As Hosking notes, the term Rus' denotes the Kievan and Muscovite states and is connected to "the people, the language and the pre-imperial principalities," not the empire or European power (Russia, xix). See also Tolz, who asserts that the term Holy Rus' was linked to the image of Mother Russia, and that the term originated in the seventeenth century to denote the "Orthodox Russian peasantry, persecuted by its own government" (Russia, 168). 48. "OTeqecrna H ,nhIM HaM cJia,noK H rrpwneH." Derzhavin, Stikhotvoreniia, 284. Trans. mine.

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49. I am indebted to Stephen Baehr's note on this series of references in "Is Moscow Burning? Fire in Griboedov's Woe from W'it" (411). Clearly the line was well known to Goncharov and his readers, as he makes another parodic reference to it earlier in Frigate Pallas when he states that it is not the smoke of the fatherland, but the ice, that is sweet and pleasant (209). Perhaps even more than most Russian writers, Goncharov was deeply aware of the Odyssey, as Singleton shows in No Place like Home. Oblomov can be read as a detailed and skilled parody of the ancient epic (see pp. 69-92). Moreover, Goncharov was certainly familiar with Griboedov's famous play Woe from Wit. He proved, later in life at least, to be an unusually close reader of the play, as his 1871 critical essay dedicated to the subject of Chatskii, "The Tormented Million" (Milon terzanii), reveals. It seems evident that Goncharov was well aware of the intertextuality of this phrase and that he used it in a deliberate and significant fashion. 50. The theme of the anti-Odyssry in Russian literature is important, if underexplored. Dead Souls, Oblomov, even Eugene Onegin, can all be read in these terms. Goncharov himself seems to suggest the pertinence of the failed-or missing-Odyssry in Russian culture in his comment in materials prepared for an essay on Ostrovskii's historical dramas: "Our Iliad, that is, what is referred to as the 'heroic period' in other histories-lasted until Peter-but there has not been any kind of Odyssey. There have been plenty of Odysseuses, if you please, but hardly a single Penelope" (Ss, 1952, VIII: 179). Trans. mine. 51. Goncharov, Fregat ''Pallada," 550. Trans. and emph. mine. 52. Bassin, "Inventing Siberia," 776-7. Gibson likewise stresses the popular perception of Siberia as a place in which there was neither a gentry nor a serf class ("Paradoxical Perceptions of Siberia," 87-8); he also notes, however, that Goncharov may not necessarily have viewed the absence of the landed gentry in Siberia in a positive light (83-4). Oblomov has often been read as an indictment of serfdom, but Goncharov's treatment of the issue, both in the novel and elsewhere, is at best ambiguous. Diment summarizes the ambivalence surrounding Goncharov's views in relation to Oblomov (Goncharov's Oblomov, 30-2). 53. Interestingly, in "Whose Orient is it?" Lim argues that Russian colonial presence in Siberia is presented in Frigate Pallas as an alternative model to English colonial practices, or as a "softened" version of the exploitive relationship between colonizer-settlers and natives that Goncharov observed in the many English colonies that he visited (35-6). 54. Singleton, No Place like Home, 69-92. 55. See Griffiths and Rabinowitz for a discussion of "Homer worship" in nineteenth-century Russian arts and letters (Novel Epics, 8). 56. Goncharov, The Frigate Pallas, 554. 57. Griffiths and Rabinowitz, Novel Epics, 19-20. 58. As Lukacs maintains, the age depicted in Homeric literature is one in which the individual self neither knows nor conceives of an "other" (The Theory of the Novel, 30). This is an age of perceived wholeness, or essential "home-ness:" individuals are "at

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home" in their world and experience no dissonance between their interior self and the outside world. It is the realization of this dissonance that ushers in the modern era of "transcendental homelessness." Griffiths and Rabinowitz note, however, that it is precisely the context of uncertainty and alienation surrounding Odysseus's return that makes the classic epic a masterpiece. What Lukacs identifies, in their view, is the perception of the epic age as unified and harmonious by nineteenth-century writers seeking a resolution ro contemporary alienation and spiritual homelessness (Novel Epics, 19-20). 59. As Singleton has noted, both Dead Souls and Oblomov are preoccupied with an idealized Russian domesticity, and Chichikov and Oblomov form an oppositional pairing (No Place like Home, 67). 60. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 245. Emph. original. 61. Oblomov's co-dependent relationship with his manservant, Zakhar, is the central relationship of his life, at least in the first part of the novel. 62. Goncharov, Fregat ''Pa/Lada," 544. Trans. and emph. mine. 63. Goncharov, Fregat ''Pa/Lada," 539. Trans. mine. This passage recalls an earlier Oblomovian moment in the text in Chapter 10 ("Shanghai"). While rossing at sea, Goncharov recalls the pleasures of overland travel in Russia, where the traveler, buried in his featherbed, sleeps through much of the journey ( The Frigate Pallas, 338). 64. As Schivelbusch notes in his study of the reception of the railroad in nineteenth-century Europe, this new travel technology "annihilated" time and space for its early users. Disparate points on the map were suddenly close neighbors as the geographical space between them appeared to be eradicated by fast travel; there seemed to be only points of departure and destination and no longer any space in between. The new proximity of geographical points, combined with their accessibility to the formerly more stationary lower classes, made once distinct places appear to lose their uniqueness and value (The Railway journey, 33-44). 65. In "Improvising Empire," Dwyer shows how Dostoevsky's depiction of train travel in W'inter Notes on Summer Impressions collapses the spatial distance between Russia and Europe to nothing (66, 94). 66. For the sake of comparison, it is worthy of note that the Trans-Continental Railroad across the United States was completed in 1869, 36 years before the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in 1905. This historical fact perhaps suggests some differences in the American and Russian approaches to the integration of their frontiers into national space. 67. In fact, Goncharov complains about the increasing presence of British hegemony around the globe and the ensuing destruction of "placeness," or of distinct cultural spheres. See, for example, his complaint about the ubiquitous presence of the English in what were once remote corners of the world: "Wonders, poetry? I said already that they do not exist. Travel has lost its romantic character [.... ] Everything has come down to a prosaic level[ .... ] I passed masses of Portuguese and Englishmen on Madeira and the Cape Verde Islands; Dutchmen, Negroes, Hottentots, and-again Englishmen at the Cape of Good Hope; Malayans, Indians, and-Englishmen in the Malayan archipelago and in China[ .... ] Your muses [... ] would not point to any poetic picture

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that catches the eye of the traveler. What picture do you see? Not one of overwhelming beauty with the attributes of strength, not with the spark of demonic fire in the eyes, not with a sword, not with a crown, but simply with a black frock coat, a round hat, a white vest, and a parasol in hand. This creature rules in the world[ .... ] It is everywhere[ .... ]" (7he Frigate Pallas, 10-1 I). 68. Chaadaev, Major Works, 30.

5: A Radical at Large I. Herzen acquired Swiss citizenship in 185 I but did not reside in Switzerland for more than a few months at a time. For a list of Herzen's many London residences, see Appendix C in Carr's classic biographical study, 7he Romantic E·