The Moscow/St. Petersburg binary shapes Russia’s symbolic geography. Moscow is the self-styled inheritor of Kyivan Rus’, the medieval Slavic state located in what is now Ukraine (where, at the time of writing, the Russian Federation is waging a bloody war of conquest). By “absorbing” the Kyivan heritage, the state now governed from Moscow has at times effected Ukraine’s symbolic erasure, moving the “center” of East Slavic culture five hundred miles to the east. And yet Moscow’s supposed centrality derives meaning largely from the peripheralness of anothercapital, St. Petersburg, foundedin 1704 by the coercively westernizing emperor Peter the Great. For two centuries Petersburg—a center situated on a geographic periphery, the capital of an outward-looking empire—was everything Moscow was not: new, bureaucratic, “western,” symbolically masculine, ethnically hybrid. This opposition has worked to dilute the meanings attached to “provincial” places, i.e., virtually all places located outside the two capitals butnotin exotic non-Russian borderlands like the Caucasus. Taking as examples Tatiana Tolstoya’s “Fakir” (1986, Moscow) and Evgeny Zamiatin’s “The Cave” (1920, Petersburg), this chapter examines how the Russian worldview—particularly Russians’ anxious perception of themselves as provincials—can inform World Literature debates around centers and peripheries.

The author reflects upon Allahabad in this chapter. A town in north India that was known for its cultivation of intellectual life as well as being a major religious hub, it has now been renamed in an attempt to stamp out its Islamic history. The change is not merely a physical one but also reflected in its intellectual decline. The chapter juxtaposes the decline of the city’s tradition of synthesis and cultural confluence with the rise of an active anti-intellectualism along with an aggressive display of majoritarian religious symbolism, and the way it changes the texture of home

This chapter explicates the ways in which setting matters in Coetzee’s writing. The settings assembled in its mises en scène are vital to narrative world-making; at the same time, they perform an indexical function that invests these narratives with ‘worldly weight’, thus establishing a relation to the real that is simultaneously fictitious and true. Tracking a movement from the insular and segregated state of apartheid South Africa, through the provincial-metropolitan axis and along the southern latitudes in Foe, Boyhood, Youth, and Slow Man, the chapter shows how these settings indicate a sustained and deepening sense of situatedness that is both informed by and larger than the national contexts of South Africa and Australia. Chafing against the national frame, the settings of these works elaborate the category of the provincial and then redirect it to that of ‘the South’. They function as neither tromp l’oeil nor exotic local colour, neither blank screen nor empty frame, but instead convey the substance of the ‘real South’ while locating it as alternative centre of gravity that generates its own deictic markers.