Imagined geography of Russia in Western travelogues: Conceptualizing space through history

Abstract

In modern societies, imagined geographies are constituted, along with other means, by travel literature. Unlike standardized tourist guides, travelogues offer personalized accounts of ‘genuine’ experiences of exploration and encounter. These experiences, however, are largely informed by the accounts of the previous travelers and require a number of literary devices and rhetorical strategies to create a coherent, engaging and authoritative narrative. This article focuses on literary and conceptual means employed to produce the ‘imagined geography’ of Russia in two travelogues published at the same time (2010) – Rachel Polonsky’s Molotov’s Magic Lantern and Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia. Despite the differences in the narratorial personae and in the literary form (Polonsky’s travelogue is much more ‘experimental’ than Frazier’s), these travelogues have much in common in the ways they describe the spatial experience of Russia by connecting space to time and history. Moreover, spatial travel turns into time travel as the parallel spatial and temporal hierarchy emerges, built around several oppositions: modern, Western/European, urban, commercial places vs. unmodern, East/Asian, small town/village, de-industrialized and depressed space. Social ordering of space, therefore, becomes a reproduction of the power relations between the individual and the state, periphery and the center. These oppositions reflect how Russian historical experience of modernity is inscribed in its vast space, this experience being interpreted by the travelers through the emotional and vivid image of a ‘broken modernity’. Russian people in Frazier’s text resemble ‘survivalists’ at a ‘post-apocalyptic’ frontier while, for Polonsky, the post-Soviet Russians are disconnected from their past and incapable of imagining their future.