Contested Russian Tourism: Cosmopolitanism, Nation, and Empire in the Nineteenth Century (Imperial Encounters in Russian History)

"This literary, cultural history examines imperial Russian tourism's entanglement in the vexed issue of cosmopolitanism understood as receptiveness to the foreign and pitted against provinciality and nationalist anxiety about the allure and the influence of Western Europe. The study maps the shift from Enlightenment cosmopolitanism to Byronic cosmopolitanism with special attention to the art pilgrimage abroad. For typically middle-class Russians daunted by the cultural riches of the West, vacationing in the North Caucasus, Georgia, and the Crimea afforded the compensatory opportunity to play colonizer kings and queens in "Asia." Drawing on Anna Karenina and other literary classics, travel writing, journalism, and guidebooks, the investigation engages with current debates in cosmopolitan studies, including the fuzzy paradigm of "colonial cosmopolitanism.""-- Provided by publisher Becoming tourists. Russia's enlightenment travel model: Karamzin, the English, and Italy ; The romantic vacation mentality ; Nationalist worries about tourism: Pogodin, Belinsky, Zagoskin ; Vacationing in the Caucasus: authenticity and the sophisticate/provincial divide -- Shocks of modernization. Inundating the West after the Crimean War ; Tourist angst: aesthetics, moral imagination, and politics in Tolstoy's Lucerne ; Cosmopolitans, the crowd, and radical killjoys: Turgenev, other writers, and the critics ; Dostoevsky's anti-cosmopolitan animus toward tourism -- Embourgeoisement and its enemies. The rising tourist tide: foreign travel from winter notes to Anna Karenina ; Anna Karenina and the tourist passion for Italy ; Tatars and the tourist boom in the Crimea: Markov's Sketches of the Crimea and other writings ; Tourist decadence at the fin-de-siècle: Chekhov, Veselitskaya, and other writers This literary, cultural history examines Russian tourism via the prism of cosmopolitanism, pitted against provinciality and nationalist anxiety about the allure of Western Europe. The study’s thematic axis sets daunting cultural riches of the West against the compensatory Russian pleasure of playing the “European” colonizer on vacation in “Asia.” A literary, cultural history that examines imperial Russian tourism's entanglement in the vexed issue of cosmopolitanism understood as receptiveness to the foreign and pitted against provinciality and nationalist anxiety about the allure and the influence of Western Europe.