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Of Hats and Trains: Cultural Traffic in Leskov‘s and Dostoevski‘s Westward Journeys

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Anne Dwyer
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Abstract

The first train line connecting St. Petersburg with western Europe opened in 1862, providing the occasion for Fedor Dostoevskii and Nikolai Leskov to take positions in regard to train travel, cultural traffic, and Russia's insertion into modernity. Anne Dwyer's analysis of Dostoevskii's WinterNotes on Summer Impressionsand Leskov's “From a Travel Diary” reveals an essential paradox. While Leskov is eager to foster the railroad, he switches hats with ease and offers pragmatic performances of an imperial identity based on his competency in the languages of the borderlands. In contrast, the nationalist Dostoevskii fulminates against train travel yet explores the ways in which modernity's onset changes human experience and literary possibilities. Their bifurcated yet equally ambivalent responses to modernity as emblematized by the railroad illuminate the diversity of attempts to articulate a Russian identity in relationship both to Russia's own people(s) and to western Europe in the modern age.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 70 , Issue 1 , Spring 2011 , pp. 67 - 93
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2011

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References

1 This article has benefitted from suggestions by Avram Brown, Luba Golburt, Konstantine Klioutchkine, Eric Naiman, Irina Paperno, Sabrina Rahman, Mark D. Steinberg, and the anonymous readers for Slavic Review. The epigraph is taken from Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment ,trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, 1993), 129. Schedules printed in St. Petersburg newspapers suggest the line was promoted as connecting the Russian capital with western Europe. Times of departure and arrival are listed for each stop of the daily train to Berlin, while the thrice-weekly train to Warsaw is posted in smaller print at the bottom of the page (e.g., Severnaia pchela ,3 November 1862). Rail was, of course, not new to the Russian empire. Track between Warsaw and Vienna was completed in 1848, and the Moscow-St. Petersburg line began operations in 1851. Westwood, J. N, A History of Russian Railways (London, 1964), 25.Google Scholar

2 McLean, Hugh, Nikolai Leskov: The Man and His Art(Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Leskov's travel diary was only recendy reprinted in Leskov, N. S, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30–i tomakh (Moscow, 1996; hereafter PSS ),3:5–157.Google Scholar

4 Winter Notes was first published in the Dostoevskii brothers'journal Vremia. About his prison and exile in Siberia Dostoevskii famously remarked that he had always wanted to go to Italy but landed instead in Semipalatinsk. He plays on this sense of a belated journey and deferred arrival in Winter Notes. Letter to la. P. Polonskii, 31 July 1861, in Dostoevskii, F. M, Polnoesobraniesochinenii v 30–i tomakh(Leningrad, 1972–1990; hereafter PSS ),28.2:19.Google Scholar

5 Scholars have argued that from about 1790 to 1840 the literary travelogue served as the privileged genre for exploring new conceptions of selfhood and national identity in Russian literature. See Schonle, Andreas, Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary Journey, 1790–1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 2000)Google Scholar and Dickinson, Sara, Breaking Ground: Travel and National Culture in Russia from Peter I to the Era of Pushkin (Amsterdam, 2006).Google Scholar For the years after the Crimean War, see Offord, Derek, Journeys to a Graveyard: Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing(Dordrecht, 2005).Google Scholar

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7 Leskov, , “Russkoe obshchestvo v Parizhe,” PSS, 3:185–371.Google Scholar Here, Leskov is concerned primarily with the Slavic diaspora in western Europe.

8 My use of the term cultural traffic is indebted to scholarship on Franz Kafka, the author who most creatively explored the full semantic range of the German Verkehr (ranging from traffic in the city to conversation to sexual intercourse). See the chapter “The Traffic of Clothes,” in Anderson, Mark M, Kafka's Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the HabsburgVm de Siécle (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar, which explores clothes as both a “metaphor for and embodiment of this modern ‘traffic'” (26). See also Zilcosky, John, Kafka's Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (New York, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 On the social meaning of costume versus clothing, see Roche, Daniel, Tlie Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the “Ancien Regime, ” trans. Birrel, Jean (Cambridge, Eng., 1994), 3–21.Google Scholar

10 In official Habsburg parlance, “Ruthenian” refers to Ukrainians living in the Habsburg empire. The Czech nationality gets added to Leskov's list of mistaken identities in his Parisian notes.

11 The narrator of Winter Notes is a blatant literary construction; Leskov's text does not explicidy distance traveler from author but takes an ironic narrative stance typical of the feuilleton. I will distinguish traveler/narrator from author throughout my discussion.

12 Wolfgang Schivelbusch discusses common tropes of early railroad travel, including the vogue for “panoramic” views out of the train window (which Dostoevskii pointedly refuses to reproduce), the complaint of train-induced boredom and illness, alienation from one's fellow passengers, and the commodification of the individual. Schivelbusch, , The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Space and Time in the Nineteenth Century,new ed. (Berkeley, 1986), 1–70.Google Scholar

13 Schedules published by the Main Company have passengers leaving St. Petersburg at 9:30 p.m. and arriving in Berlin at 5:15 a.m., two and a half days later, e.g., Severnaia pchela ,6 May 1862. On the Nikolaev railway, see Westwood, Russian Railways ,34–37. Technical information on construction, routes, and schedules of both lines can be found in Collignon, Edouard, Les chemins defer misses de 1857 à 1862,2d ed. (Paris, 1868).Google Scholar Collignon, however, puts travel time between St. Petersburg and Berlin at a shorter 42 hours. Before the arrival of the railroad, travel time from Moscow to Petersburg to Berlin would have varied. Starting in 1820, a private joint-stock company running coaches between Moscow and Petersburg promised a travel time of 96–108 hours, excepting the “bad road season.” By 1841, coaches ran according to strictly observed schedules between the two capitals and between St. Petersburg and the Prussian border, though I have not been able to determine their travel time. K. V. Bazilevich, The Russian Posts in the XIX Century (1927), trans. David M. Skipton (n.p., 1987), 23–29. For an account of Dostoevskii's path through Europe, including travel times and train routes, see M. I. Brusovani and P. G. Gal'perina, “Zagranichnye puteshestviia F. M. Dostoevskogo 1862 i 1863 gg.,” in Bazanov, V. G, ed., Dostoevskii: Materialy i issledovaniia (Leningrad, 1988), 8:272–92.Google Scholar

14 Among Russian public figures, Aleksandr Herzen was alone in siding with the Poles. For recent discussions of the Russian public's response to the uprising, see Olga Maiorova, “War as Peace: The Trope of War in Russian Nationalist Discourse during the Polish Uprising of 1863,” Kritika 6, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 501–34; Theodore R. Weeks, “Official and Popular Nationalisms: Imperial Russia 1863–1914,” in von Hirschhausen, Ulrike and Leonhard, Jörn, eds., Nationalismen in Europa: West– und Osteuropa im Vergleich(Göttingen, 2001), 411–32;Google Scholar Renner, Andreas, Russischer Nationalisms und Öffentlichkeit im Zarenreich 1855–1875 (Cologne, 2000).Google Scholar

15 The Habsburgs had lost Lombardy to the newly united Italy in 1859, though they would retain possession of Venetia until 1866. Reports on Garibaldi's adventures, including his capture at Aspromonte in 1862, were a near daily feature in Russian newspapers. On the Russian press's response to the Risorgimento, see Renner, RussischerNationalismus, 103–17.

16 Cited in Schivelbusch, , Railivay Journey,33.Google Scholar

17 A note on spelling is due: my solution to the problem of borderland toponymy is the perhaps fittingly arbitrary one of leaving it to the narrating traveler, i.e., following Leskov's usage. Hence L'vov (rather than Lwów, L'viv or Lemberg), Dinaburg, Vil'no. The exception is the now standard English “Krakow” instead of the transliterated Russian “Krakov.“

18 The digressive narration of Winter Notes owes much to Laurence Sterne's Sentimentaljourney to France and Italy (1768), a text that thwarts reader expectations by stopping short of its announced destination. But Dostoevskii's manipulations of narrative time and space, I suggest, owe as much to the railroad as to Sterne.

19 Leskov's travel notes have experienced a modest but steady critical reception focusing primarily on Leskov's representation of Jews and non-Russian Slavs. Edgerton, William B treats Leskov's proximity to Ukrainian circles in “Leskov and Russia's Slavic Brethren,” in American Contributions to the Fourth International Congress of Slavicists, Moscoiu, September 1958 (The Hague, 1958), 51–76.Google Scholar In contrast, Sal'nikova, T. S suggests a more broadly humanistic agenda in “Ideia bratstva narodov v putevykh ocherkakh N. S. Leskova,” Voprosy nisskoi literatury 25, no. 10 (1976): 94–101.Google Scholar More recently Aleksandr V. Kuz'min has devoted attention to Leskov's nuanced representation of Poles and “documentary“ representation of Jews in the text. He also points to the problem of mistaken identity in the travelogue. Kuz'min, , Inorodets v tvorchestve N. S. Leskova: Problema izobrazheniia i otsenhi (St. Petersburg, 2003), 18–30, 89–93.Google Scholar See also McLean, Hugh, “Theodore the Christian Looks at Abraham the Hebrew: Leskov and the Jews,” California Slavic Studies 7 (1973): 65–98;Google Scholar and McLean, Nikolai Leskov ,86–93.

20 I borrow the term situational identity from sociology, where it refers to the construction and presentation of any of a number of possible social identities depending on the situation. Jonathan Y. Okamura, “Situational Ethnicity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 4, no. 4 (October 1981): 452–65; Rex, John, “TheTheory of Identity,” in Goulbourne, Harry, ed., Race and Ethnicity: Critical Concepts in Sociology (London, 2001), 1:232–52Google Scholar

21 “Ob'iavlenie o podpiske na zhurnal ‘Vremia’ na 1861 god,” in Dostoevskii, PSS, 18:35. For an overview of pochvennichestvo, see Frank, Joseph, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation 1860–1865 (Princeton, 1986), 34–47.Google Scholar See also Dowler, Wayne, Dostoevsky, Grigor'ev, and Native Soil Conservatism (Toronto, 1982);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Scanlan, James, Dostoevsky the Thinker (Ithaca, 2002), 197–230.Google Scholar

22 My work builds on recent efforts, spearheaded in the journal Ab imperio ,to write “new imperial history,” a perspective that “suggests replacing the question ‘what is empire?' with the question of how the imperial space is populated, lived, experienced, and conceived of.” Editor's introduction, “Homo Imperii Revisits the ‘Biographic Turn,'” Ab imperio 10, no. 1 (2009), at abimperio.net/cgi-bin/aishow.pl?state=showa&idart=2339&idlang=l&Code=HMY0DoaxFSkP5ofPo53uWGf8r (last accessed 3 December 2010). The potential for “mobility studies” to revise our understanding of literary history by drawing attention to multiple identities, historical contingencies, and moments of historical rupture and violence is discussed by Stephen Greenblatt in “Racial Memory and Literary History,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (January 2001): 48–63.

23 Greenfeld, Liah, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).Google Scholar

24 Leskov's text resists categorization in the typology of Russian travel writing provided by Offord, which distinguishes between journeys within Russia, in a borderland, and abroad. By blurring these distinctions, Leskov offers possibilities for thinking of these geopolitical categories as continuous and contiguous, rather than sharply delineated. Offord, Journeys to a Graveyard ,13–24.

25 In recent years, Leskov has attracted scholarly attention as the most significant writer of his era to explore Russia as a multiethnic and multiconfessional space. Knut Andreas Grimstad offers an innovative treatment of the “stylistics of confrontation” in mature, Leskov's prose in Styling Russia: Mulliculture in the Prose of Nikolai Leskov (Bergen, 2007).Google Scholar For a Lotman-inspired reading of artistic space in Leskov, see Maiorova, O. E, “N. S. Leskov: Struktura etno-konfessional'nogo prostranstva,” in Tynianovskii sbornik, vol. 10, Shestye-Sed'mye-Vos'mye Tynianovskie chteniia (Moscow, 1998), 118–38.Google Scholar On Leskov's engagement with Jews in the Russian empire (including an interesting comparison with Dostoevskii), see Safran, Gabriella, Reuniting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire (Stanford, 2000)Google Scholar, 108–46 and Safran, “Ethnography, Judaism, and the Art of Nikolai Leskov,” Russian Review 59, no. 2 (April 2000): 235–51. Finally, Kuz'min provides a systematic discussion of Leskov's representation of individual ethnic groups in Inorodets v tvorchestve N. S. Leskova.

26 In the 1840s the daily Severnaia pchela (1825–64), run by Faddei Bulgarin and subsidized by the secret police, was a major tribune of the right, but in 1860 the paper was taken over by editor Pavel Usov, who strove to articulate “a position somewhere between radicalism and conservatism.” McLean, Nikolai Leskov ,78–79. See also Belknap, Robert L, “Survey of Russian Journals, 1840-80,” in Martinsen, Deborah A, ed., Literary Journals in Imperial Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 1997), 97.Google Scholar

27 Declaring that “nothing is as important for the successful economic development of Russia as the construction of railroads,” the paper's 11 June 1862 lead article proposed that the labor force used for the St. Petersburg-Warsaw line simply be transferred to the new construction site. Such exhortations came to naught, as major railroad connections through the western provinces were built only decades later.

28 Leskov, PSS ,3:92. In addition to military concerns, railway development in Russia was catalyzed by the urgency of grain transport. Existing river commerce was both expensive and slow: grain took seven months (or two navigation seasons) to reach St. Petersburg from the lower Volga. A consequence of this unwieldy system was that if a particular region suffered a bad harvest, grain from more fortunate areas could not be shipped fast enough. Westwood, Russian Railways ,17, 26.

29 “Otkrytie dvizheniia na vsei linii peterburgsko-varshavskoi zheleznoi dorogi,“ Severnaia pchela ,10 September 1862.

30 Leskov, , PSS ,3:7.Google Scholar

31 Schivelbusch, , Railway Journey ,38.Google Scholar

32 Leskov, , PSS ,3:11.Google Scholar

33 The leech anecdote is puzzling: it is possible the women decided the would-be doctor must need leeches in his medical practice; but the image of Jews as bloodsuckers— a standard antisemitic trope—also resonates. Elsewhere, Leskov uses an aesopic medical discussion of leeches and bloodletting to speculate about a possible Polish uprising. Leskov, , PSS ,3:11, 114.Google Scholar

34 Schönle, Authenticity andFiction ,9. The other necessarily invoked author is Sterne: Dostoevskii spars with Karamzin in Winter Notes; Leskov nods to the tradition of literary travel by citing both Sterne and Heinrich Heine in the first pages of his diary.

35 In Karamzin's Letters ,the Germans, though apparently on a Bildungsreise ,are revealed to be considerably less educated and worldly than the Russian traveler. In Schönle's assessment, Karamzin gives the Germans a “lesson in sovereign, self-possessed adaptability.“ Karamzin, N. M, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika (Leningrad, 1984), 11–12;Google Scholar Schonle, , Authenticity and Fiction ,46.Google Scholar

36 Mills Todd, William, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).Google Scholar

37 Karamzin's use of Ruskoi narod to refer to himself and his peers also contrasts with the usage of this term especially by Dostoevskii (and many of his contemporaries), in which narod usually (though not always) refers to the “common people” as opposed to Russia's higher or educated classes. See Nathaniel Knight, “Ethnicity, Nationality and the Masses: Narodnost’ and Modernity in Imperial Russia,” in Hoffmann, David L and Kotsonis, Yanni, eds., Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (New York, 2000), 41–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 Leskov laments the lack of accurate maps of the empire (other than those of the Russian Geographical Society, which are prohibitively expensive): the German map erases the vibrant trading town of Pinsk by labeling the entire area “Pinsker Siimpfe” (Pinsk Swamps). Leskov, , PSS ,3:103.Google Scholar

39 Some ethnographic passages come verbatim from Jósef Ignacy Kraszewski's Wspomnienia Wotynia, Polesia i Litwy (1840). Leskov's appropriation of a Polish source represents another gesture of imperial integration, a kind of literary correlate to railway expansion.

40 For example, Leskov tells the legend of a Jewish merchant who donated silver horses to the iconostasis of a Roman Catholic church after a Catholic saint helped him find his lost horse. Leskov, , PSS ,3:98.Google Scholar

41 Ibid., 3:28.

42 Lotman, Iurii M, “O semiosfere,” in hbrannye stat'i v trekh tomakh (Tallinn, 1992), 1:16.Google Scholar

43 I assume the term vengerka here to refer, not to a Hungarian woman, but to a Hungarian-style riding coat with a high waist and a number of ties. I translate it as a “man wearing a Hungarian coat” and subsequently as “the Hungarian” because of the pattern of sartorial metonymy (reminiscent of Nikolai Gogol’) at play in the passage. Akademiia Nauk SSSR, Slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo literatumogo iazyka ,vol. 2 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1952), s.v. “vengerka.“

44 Leskov, PSS, 3:139.

45 The konfederatka is thought to have originated at the Bar Confederation (1768–1776).

46 Davies, Norman, God's Playground: A History of Poland (New York, 1982), 2: 350–51.Google Scholar

47 This discussion of sartorial policies and responses relies on Zielińska, Marta, Polacy. Rosjane. Romantyzm (Warsaw, 1998), 161–75;Google Scholar Mozdżyńska-Nawotka, Malgorzata, O modach i strojach (Wroclaw, 2002), 199–203;Google Scholar Sieradzka, Anna, Tysiqc lat ubiorow w Polsce (Warsaw, 2003), 173–81.Google Scholar

48 Dal', Vladimir, Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskago iazyka ,3d ed., vol. 4 (St Petersburg, 1909), s.v. “sbruia.“Google Scholar

49 Turnau, Irena, Slownik ubiorów (Warsaw, 1999), 61.Google Scholar

50 Venturi, Franco, “L'immagine di Garibaldi in Russia all'epoca della liberazione dei servi,” Rassegnastorica ToscanaQ ,no. 4 (1960): 313.Google Scholar

51 The close metaphorical link between clothes, language, and national identity is pronounced in Habsburg texts (and not only in Franz Kafka). Consider Galician/Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko's letter to his bride explaining why he is writing in Ukrainian, rather than in German as he had done previously: “you ask why I am writing [you] in Ruthenian and not in German? That's simple. German speech is for me—like a fashionable tailcoat [frak] with empty sleeves, worn by Stutzer. And Ruthenian is the language of my favorite house clothes, in which [ … ] I appear as the person I truly am, as the person who loves you more than anything.” Cited by Iaroslav Hrytsak in “Natsionaliziruiia mnogoetnichnoe prostranstvo: Istorii Ivana Franko i Galitsii,” Ab imperio 10, no. 1 (2009), at abimperio.net/cgi-bin/aishow.pl?state=showa&idart=2340&idlang=2&Code= (last accessed 3 December 2010).

52 Leskov, , PSS ,3:11.Google Scholar

53 Dostoevskii, , PSS ,6:7.Google Scholar

54 Leskov, , PSS ,3:156.Google Scholar

55 Ibid., 3:12.

56 Karamzin, , Pis'ma ,10. English translation from Karamzin, N. M, Letters of a Russian Traveller ,ed. and trans. Kahn, Andrew (Oxford, 2003), 29.Google Scholar

57 Davies, , God's Playground ,2:82.Google Scholar

58 Karamzin, Pis'ma ,9; Karamzin, Letters, 27.

59 Ingrid Kleespies, “Caught at the Border: Travel, Nomadism, and Russian National Identity in Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveler and Dostoevski's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions,” Slavic and East European Journal 50, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 233. For a reading of Karamzin's movement away from “home” as a process of transformation into a “traveling writer,” see ibid., 234–41.

60 Karamzin, Pis'ma ,12; Karamzin, Letters ,31.

61 Wendy Bracewell notes that in many such travel accounts, which she dubs “domopis,“ negotiations “between Slav and German, Hungarian or Italian, for instance, or between Slav and Slav” often take place in coaches, steamboats, and railway carriages, which are “not simply a means for the narrator to move from place to place, but a locale in itself, where the traveler is compelled to rub up against the world.” Bracewell, “Travels through the Slav World,” in Bracewell, Wendy and Drace–Francis, Alex, eds., Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe (Budapest, 2008), 161–62.Google Scholar

62 Most directly, Dostoevskii enters into dialogue with Nikolai Karamzin's Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika (Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1791–92) and Denis Fonvizin's Pis'ma iz vtorogo zagranichnogo puteshestviia (Letters from France, 1777–78), but he also engages with more contemporary texts by Aleksandr Herzen, Vassili Botkin, Evgeniia Tur, and others. An overview of Dostoevskii's actual journey and a discussion of Winter Notes can be found in Frank, Dostoevskii: The Stir of Liberation ,179–96 and 233–48. On his engagement with the literary tradition, see especially Il'ia Pomerantsev, “Dostoevskii i literature puteshestvii,” Russian, Croatian and Serbian, Czech and Slovak, Polish Literature 45, no. 1 (January 1999): 93–109; Kleespies, “Caught at the Border.” On Dostoevskii and the post-Crimean context, see Offord, Journeys to a Graveyard ,197–220.

63 Relatively little attention has been paid to the role of the train in Winter Notes. On the railroad in Dostoevskii's later novels, see David Bethea, The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton, 1989), 62–104, and Anne Lounsbery, “Dostoevskii's Geography: Centers, Peripheries, and Networks in Demons,” Slavic Review 66 ,no. 2 (Summer 2007): 211–29. Bethea focuses on the narrative momentum provided by the train, demonstrating that it bears much of the apocalyptic vision of The Idiot ,while Lounsbery emphasizes the spatial aspects of the railroad as an ominous network in Demons. For a general overview, see Stephen L. Baehr, “The Troika and the Train: Dialogues between Tradition and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature,” in Clayton, J. Douglas, ed., World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies (Columbus, 1989), 85–106.Google Scholar Tsypkin's, Leonid Summer in Baden-Baden ,trans. Roger and Angela Keys (New York, 1987)Google Scholar offers an artistic imagining of Dostoevskii's train travel to western Europe. On train networks creating preconditions for certain patterns of modernist thought, see Presner, Todd, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Kozlov, Sergei, “Krusheniie poezda: Transportnaia metaforika Maksa Vebera,” Novoeliteraturnoeobozrenie ,no. 71 (2005): 7–60.Google Scholar

64 Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:46;Google Scholar Dostoevskii, Fyodor, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, trans. David Patterson (Evanston, 1987; hereafter WN), 21.Google Scholar English citations of Winter Notes are adapted from Patterson's translation.

65 Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:69;Google Scholar, WN ,37.

66 The London Underground opened in 1863. Ekaterina Dianina offers an interesting discussion of Dostoevskii's Crystal Palace within the context of western and Russian journalism; in fact, she suggests that the Crystal Palace may have been one of the many European sites that Dostoevskii missed! Dianina, ‘“Veshchnyi mir’ F. M. Dostoevskogo: Dostoevskii v khrustal'nom dvortse,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie ,no. 57 (2002): 107–25.

67 Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:48;Google Scholar Dostoevskii, VWV, 4.

68 For Mikhail Bakhtin, the most “abstractly precise” and “mathematical” incarnation of this discourse is Notes from Underground (1863), but the narrator of Winter Notes is clearly the underground man's immediate spiritual and discursive predecessor. Bakhtin, , Problems of Dostoevskii's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, 1984), 230.Google Scholar

69 Michael A. Bernstein identifies Dostoevskian ressentiment as a “crisis of citation,“ in which the hero recognizes that even “his worst grievances lack any trace of particularity.“ For Bernstein, this is one of the central crises of nineteenth-century thought. Bernstein, , Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero (Princeton, 1992), 104, 108.Google Scholar Greenfeld, in turn, pinpoints ressentiment as “the most important factor” in the “crystallization of the matrix of Russian nationalism.” Greenfeld, Nationalism ,250. While figures such as Leskov demonstrate that the Russian quest for national identity need not necessarily play out in terms of ressentiment, in the Winter Notes passage cited, Dostoevskii explicitly conflates his hero's crisis of citation with a more general crisis of Russian national identity.

70 This passage echoes Gogof's parody of Friedrich Schiller and E. T. A. Hoffmann in “Nevskii Prospekt,” where Germans make fun of Russians in a way that establishes the Russians’ superiority.

71 Holger Siegel, “Fedor M. Dostojevskijs Reisebericht WinterlicheAufzeichnungen ilber sotnmerlicheEindriicke aus demjahre 1863,” in Xenia von Ertzdorf and Gerhard Giesemann, eds., Erkundung und Beschreibung der Welt: Zur Poetik der Reise- und Landerberichte (Amsterdam, 2003), 416. Siegel also points out the connection to the eau de cologne as an “object of everyday use.” On the scene in Cologne and Karamzin, see Pomerantsev, “Dostoevskii i literatura puteshestvii,” 94–95.

72 Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:48;Google Scholar Dostoevskii, VWV, 4.

73 Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:49;Google Scholar Dostoevskii, VWV, 4.

74 Another glaring example occurs as the narrator shops in Paris, planning to spend 10 francs but talked into parting with a 100. Dostoevskii, PSS ,5:76–77; Dostoevskii, WN, 45–46. Dostoevskii himself began to gamble heavily on this journey.

75 Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:53;Google Scholar Dostoevskii, VWV, 13. Offord provides an insightful discussion of Dostoevskii's “Russian Europe,” including the observation that by referring to a velvet frock coat as a “frantsuzskii kaftan,” Dostoevskii “appropriates it for the Russians by use of a word that is not western.” Offord, Journeys to a Graveyard ,213.

76 Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:53;Google Scholar Dostoevskii, WN ,14. Emphasis in the original.

77 Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:53;Google Scholar Dostoevskii, WN ,14. According to the editorial note, Dostoevskii is responding here in particular to K. S. Aksakov's preferred habitus.

78 Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:55;Google Scholar Dostoevskii, WN ,15. For more sartorial details: “Even the peasant understood more about us: we despised him less, were less squeamish about his habits, knew more about him, were less foreign to him, less German. [… ] All this phantasmagoria, all the masquerading, all these French caftans, lace cuffs, wigs, little swords, all these plump clumsy legs slipped into silk stockings, the soldier boys of the age with German wigs and boots—all of it, I think, was terrible knavery, the servile trickery of lackeys from below, such that even the people themselves sometimes noticed and understood it.“ Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:57;Google Scholar Dostoevskii, VWV, 18.

79 Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:53;Google Scholar Dostoevskii, WN ,21.

80 Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:47;Google Scholar Dostoevskii, WN ,26; on missing or forgetting Paris, for example, Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:63;Google Scholar Dostoevskii, WN ,15, 26.

81 Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:63;Google Scholar Dostoevskii, WN ,26.

82 On the technical details of Dostoevskii's border crossing, see Brusovani and Gal'perina, “Zagranichnye puteshestviia,” 279. On Eydkuhnen in the (mostly German) imagination, see Schlögel, Karl, Berlin, Ostbahnhof Europas: Russen und Deutsche in ihrem Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1998), 39–56.Google Scholar

83 Kleespies, “Caught at the Border,” 243.

84 Ibid., 243–49.

85 Although Offord notes that Dostoevskii's “highly selective” account omits “one of the most momentous recent political events in Europe, namely the unification of most of Italy under the leadership of Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour” in order, “for simple polemical purposes, to concentrate readers’ attention on the two nations, France and England, that seem to Dostoevskii most clearly to demonstrate the existence of a ‘pan-western individual principle,'” he does not mention that Dostoevskii's traveler also keeps quiet about one of the most momentous political events at home. Offord, Journeys to a Graveyard, 203. In fact, Dostoevskii's oblique references to both events are not so very dissimilar. As in the Polish passage discussed above, Dostoevskii mentions Garibaldi in the context of an anecdote that reflects badly on the French. Unlike in the Polish anecdote, however, Dostoevskii's actual thoughts on the Italian Risorgimento remain obscured. Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:83–84;Google Scholar Dostoevskii, WN ,55.

86 Vremia's position on the Polish Uprising is discussed in Nechaeva, Zhurnal ,303– 13; see also Frank, Dostoevskii: The Stir of Liberation ,210–12. After the closure, Dostoevskii wrote Ivan Turgenev in a vein that continues the sentiment of the “padam do nog” episode of Winter Notes: “ You know the direction of our journal: this direction is primarily Russian and even antiwestern. Well, would we have stood with the Poles? … The idea of the article … was as follows: that the Poles disdain us as Barbarians to such a degree, that they are so proud of their European civilization, that a moral … rapprochement with them is impossible to foresee in the near future.” Dostoevskii to Ivan Turgenev, St. Petersburg, 17 June 1863, PSS ,28.2:36.

87 Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:83;Google Scholar Dostoevskii, WN ,54 (emphasis in the original).

88 “Two contradictory sides of the same process: on one hand, the railroad opened up new spaces that were not as easily accessible before; on the other, it did so by destroying space, namely the space between points.” Schivelbusch, Railway Journey ,37.

89 Ibid., 52–69.

90 Ibid., 70–88. Unlike Prussian and French trains, die Moscow-Petersburg Railway was built American-style with open carriages. Based on Leskov's detailed description of an eight-person second-class compartment, however, the St. Petersburg-Warsaw Railway seems to have followed the Prussian and French model of closed compartments. (Leskov's narrator gets off the train at one of the stations to change compartments and escape the chatty lady.) See Westwood, Russian Railways ,37; Victor Röll, ed., Encyklopadie des gesamten Eisenbahnwesens ,7 vols. (Vienna, 1890–1895), s.v. “Personenwagen.“

91 Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:52;Google Scholar Dostoevskii, WN ,10.

92 Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:52;Google Scholar Dostoevskii, WN ,10.

93 Bakhtin, M. M, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in Holquist, Michael, ed., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin (Austin, 1981), 248.Google Scholar

94 Dostoevskii, , PSS ,5:52;Google Scholar Dostoevskii, WN ,10. The train car as “metaphor for the national predicament” is also discussed in Offord, Journeys to a Graveyard ,213.

95 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 245.

96 The announcement of the line's opening in the Severnaia pchelawas accompanied by a management disclaimer warning of the “provisional” nature of the trains and possible delays and “inconveniences” at stations. Severnaia pchela ,10 September 1862.

97 Leskov, , “Puteshestvie s nigilistom,” Sobranie sochinenii v 11–i tomakh (Moscow, 1957), 7:125.Google Scholar Thanks to Anne Lounsbery for drawing my attention to this story.

98 McLean, Nikolai Leskov ,86. Leskov writes that the coachman, unlike the conductor, shared the “misfortune, joy, dangers, and all the annoyances” of a prolonged journey. Leskov, , Sobranie sochinenii ,5:298–99.Google Scholar

99 The invasive search was de rigueur in travel accounts, with Habsburg officials notorious for giving travelers a hard time; usually, however, these officials were represented as German. See, for example, a contemporary unsigned account of a border crossing at Peschiera, “Avstriiskaia politsiia i russkii puteshestvennik,” Moskovskie vedemosti ,24 June 1862.

100 Leskov, , PSS ,3:128.Google Scholar

101 Benjamin, Walter, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,“ in Arendt, Hannah, ed., Illuminations (New York, 1968), 83–109.Google Scholar

102 Grimstad, , Styling Russia ,35–36.Google Scholar

103 Dostoevskii, to Fonvizina, N. D, Omsk, late January-20 February 1854, PSS, 28.1:176.Google Scholar

104 For a discussion of this attribute, see Grimstad, Styling Russia ,17–21.