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Anne Lounsbery teaches Russian literature at New York University. She has published numerous articles on Russian and comparative literature and is the author of
Thin Culture, High Art.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration and Translation
1. Geography, History, Trope: Facts on the Ground
2. Before the Provinces: Pastoral and Anti-Pastoral in Pushkin's Countryside
3. Inventing Provincial Backwardness, or "Everything is Barbarous and Horrid" (Herzen, Sollogub, and Others)
4. "This is Paris itself!": Gogol in the Town of N
5. "I Do Beg of You, Wait, and Compare!": Goncharov, Belinsky, and Provincial Taste
6. Back Home: The Provincial Lives of Turgenev's Cosmopolitans
7. Transcendence Deferred: Women Writers in the Provinces
8. Melnikov and Leskov, or What is Regionalism in Russia?
9. Centering and Decentering in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy
10. "Everything Here is Accidental": Chekhov's Geography of Meaninglessness
11. In the End: Shchedrin, Sologub, and Terminal Provinciality
12. Conclusion: The Provinces in the Twentieth Century
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Anne Lounsbery teaches Russian literature at New York University. She has published numerous articles on Russian and comparative literature and is the author of
Thin Culture, High Art.
Summary
In Life Is Elsewhere, Anne Lounsbery shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called "the provinces"—a place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. Lounsbery looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has...
