Open Access Edition of Life is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917 by Anne Lounsbery

FAIN: DR-285046-22

Cornell University (Ithaca, NY 14850-2820)
Jane Frances Bunker (Project Director: July 2021 to January 2025)

This project will publish the book Life is Elsewhere, written by NEH Fellow Anne Lounsbery (NEH grant number FA-55428-10), in an electronic open access format under the Creative Commons license CC BY-ND 4.0, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access ebook.

Associated Products

Single Publication (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Publication Type: Single Publication
Title: Life is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917
Year: 2019
ISBN: 9781501747939
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Author: Anne Lounsbery
Abstract: 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 exercised such enduring power, and what role it plays in the larger symbolic geography that structures Russian literature's representation of the nation's space. Using a comparative approach, she brings to light fundamental questions that have long gone unasked: how to understand, for instance, the weakness of literary regionalism in a country as large as Russia? Why the insistence, from Herzen through Chekhov and beyond, that all Russian towns look the same? In a literary tradition that constantly compared itself to a western European standard, Lounsbery argues, the problem of provinciality always implied difficult questions about the symbolic geography of the nation as a whole. This constant awareness of a far-off European model helps explain why the provinces, in all their supposed drabness and predictability, are a topic of such fascination for Russian writers—why these anonymous places are in effect so important and meaningful, notwithstanding the culture's nearly unremitting emphasis on their nullity and meaninglessness.
Primary URL: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501747939/life-is-elsewhere/#bookTabs=4
Primary URL Description: Cornell University Press
Secondary URL: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/74768
Secondary URL Description: OAPEN
URL 3: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/255/oa_monograph/book/71068
URL 3 Description: Project Muse
Type: Single author monograph

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