The origins of russian scenery: Volga river tourism and russian landscape aesthetics

Slavic Review

Volumn 62, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 666-680

  Ely, Christopher ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33646470689     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3185650     Document Type: Article

References (90)

1. For a more extensive description of the Chernetsovs' journey, see Christopher Ely, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 2002), 76-78. The present discussion of the Chernetsovs derives in large measure from this text.
2. Cited in G. V. Smirnov, "Grigorii Grigorovich Chernetsov i Nikanor Grigorovich Chernetsov," in A. I. Leonov, ed., Russkoe iskusstvo: Ocherki o zhizni i tvorchestve khudozhnikoυ (Moscow, 1958), 562.
3. G. V. Smirnov, "Grigorii Grigorovich Chernetsov i Nikanor Grigorovich Chernetsov," Russkoe iskusstvo: Ocherki o zhizni i tvorchestve khudozhnikoυ 1958, 562. Ibid.
4. Overviews of picturesque travel in Europe and the United States during the early nineteenth century include Lynne Withey, Grand Tours and Cook's Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750 to 1915 (New York, 1997)
5. John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1989)
6. The Chemetsovs saw their journey as an endeavor requiring "constant labor and anxiety." "In our fragile craft," they wrote, "we struggled with furious waves and immovable ice." See A. I. Korobochko and V. Ia. Liubovnyi, "Panorama Volgi akademikov G. i N. Cher-netsovykh," in Grigorii and Nikanor Chernetsov, Puteshestvie po Volge (Moscow, 1970).
7. V. A. Sollogub, Tarantas (Moscow, 1955), 13. Gogol'had already made similar statements about the Russian countryside in Dead Souls, but both writers found other means through which to reanimate the landscape and make it meaningful for their readers in ways that did not conform to European practices of scenic tourism.
8. Gina Crandell, Nature Pictorialized: "The View" in Landscape History (Baltimore, 1993), 3.
9. Among the oretical works on the historical development of landscape aesthetics, English-language scholarship has dominated in recent years.
10. See, for example, Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760 - 1800 (Stanford, 1989);
11. John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (Cambridge, Eng., 1972);
12. Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740 - 1860 (Berkeley, 1986);
13. Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Totowa, N.J., 1984);
14. Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Princeton, 1993);
15. Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester, 1990);
16. Angela Miller, Empire of the Eye: Landscape, Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875 (Ithaca, 1993);
17. Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 (New York, 1980);
18. and Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York, 1995).
19. On the relationship of tourism and scenery, see in particular, Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque;
20. Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology;
21. Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1992);
22. A. J. Burkart and S. Medlik, Tourism: Past, Present and Future (London, 1974);
23. Green, The Spectacle of Nature;
24. Sears, Sacred Places;
25. Withey, Grand Tours.
26. On Russian landscape in art and literature, see M. Epshtein, Priroda, mir, tainik vselennoi (Moscow, 1990);
27. Dmitri Likhachev, Poeziia sadov (St. Petersburg, 1991);
28. F. I. Mal'tseva, Mastera russkogo peizazha (Moscow, 1951);
29. Georges Nivat, "Le Paysage russe en tant que mythc,"Rossiia/ Russia (1987): 7-20;
30. K. V Pigarev, Russkaia literalura i izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo: Ocherki o russkom natsional'nom peizazhe seredini XIX veka (Moscow, 1972). On scenic images of the Caucasus
31. see Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge, Eng., 1994).
32. Chernetsov, Puteshestvie po Volge, 8.
33. These notes, "Vospominaniia iz puteshestviia po Volge," were recompiled in 1970 in the above-mentioned volume. I am grateful to Irina Lapshina at the Russian Museum Archive for pointing out to me the existence of the original manuscript journals and for helping me decipher them.
34. Chernetsov, Puteshestvie po Volge, 7.
35. Chernetsov, Puteshestvie po Volge, 7. Ibid., 32.
36. For a history of estate parks and gardens, see Priscilla Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate (New Haven, 1995).
37. See also Likhachev, Poeziia sadov, and the series entitled, Russkaia usaďba: Sbornik Obshchestvo izucheniia russkoi usaďby (Moscow-Rybinsk, 1994-2001).
38. Chernetsov, Puteshestvie po Volge, 151. In the supplement to these notes, which may have been written as late as 1862, a different portrait of the forest exists than what is to be found in the original travel journals. But since the period between 1838 and 1862 would witness major changes in Russian conceptions of nature, it is not surprising that the Cher-netsovs' perspective would have altered as well. In this article, I am only using the published version of the original notes.
39. Chernetsov, Puteshestvie po Volge, Ibid., 107-109
40. See, for example, D. I. Matskevich, Putevyie zametki (Kiev, 1856);
41. O. P. Shishkina, Zametki i vospominaniia russkoi puteshestvennitsy (St. Petersburg, 1843);
42. Vadim Passek, Putevyia ocherki Vadima (St. Petersburg, 1838) and Ocherki Rossii (Moscow, 1838-1840);
43. and Stepan Shevyrev, Poezdka v Kirillo-Belozerskii monastyr': Vakatsionnye dni professora S. Shevyreva v 1847 godu (Moscow, 1850). As late as 1837, Nestor Kukol'nik complained that books of picturesque sights were published "in France, England and even in Switzerland; but we ... translate and reprint the old ones, so that we only respect foreigners and are all the more convinced we have nothing good of our own." Khudozhestvennaia gazeta, 1837, no.2:32.
44. I. K. Babst, for example, in Rechnaia oblasť Volgi (Moscow, 1852), took some of his information from a German study entitled Historisch- geographische Darstellung des Storms-systems der Wolga (1839).
45. The playwright A. N. Ostrovskii was commissioned in 1856 by the Naval Ministry to join a party studying life and industry on the Volga. The article of travel notes he published drew from (and in part refuted) a French version of Haxthausen's Studies on the Interior of Russia (1847).
46. I. K. Babst, "Volga," in D. D. Semenov, ed., Otchiznovedenie: Rossiia po razskazan puteshestvennikoυ i uchenym izsledoυaniam (St. Petersburg, 1866), 2:39.
47. N. P. Bogoliubov, Volga ot Tveri do Astrakhani (St. Petersburg, 1862), v.
48. P. P. Neidgart, Putevoditeľpo Volge (St. Petersburg, 1862), 3.
49. V. I. Ragozin, Volga, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1880), 2:237.
50. A. N. Molchanov, Po Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1876), 93. To sweeten the appeal of this trip, Molchanov also proposed bringing along an orchestra!
51. See Andrew Durkin, Sergei Aksakov and Russian Pastoral (New Brunswick, N.J., 1983), 84-85.
52. Also S. T. Aksakov's "Zapiski ob uzhen'e," in S. Mashinskii, ed., Sobranie sochi-nenii v piati tomakh (Moscow, 1966), 4:288-289
53. Ragozin, Volga, 2:120.
54. Molchanov, Po Rossii, 92.
55. Ia. P. Kuchin, Putevoditeľpo Volge (Saratov, 1865), 44. Kuchin was not the first travel writer to describe the Zhiguli Range in scenic terms, however. One year earlier, for example, Babst and Konstantin Pobedonostsev had published a collection of letters describing the 1863 journey along the Volga of the young heir to the throne. Although little of their work invoked scenic description to sing the praises of provincial Russia, the section describing the Zhiguli Range used touristic language and picturesque descriptions.
56. See I. Babst and K. Pobedonostsev, Pis'ma o puteshestvii Gosudaria Naslednika Tsesarevicha po Rossii ot Peterburga do Kryma (Moscow, 1864), 264-265
57. Richard Mowbray Haywood, The Beginnings of Railway Development in Russia in the Reign of Nicholas I, 1835-1842 (Durham, 1969), 21.
58. For information on the history of passenger transportation on the Volga, see G. P. Dem'ianov, Putevoditeľpo Volge (Nizhnii-Novgorod, 1889), 10-13.
59. A. F. Lcopol'dov, Obshchie svedeniia o Volge (Saratov, 1890), 10.
60. Nikolai Lender, Na Volge (St. Petersburg, 1888). According to Lender, numbers of passengers in these years ran as follows: in 1885, 201, 213; in 1886, 242, 522; in 1887, 238, 179.
61. From an advertisement found at the end of S. Monastyrskii, Illiustrirovannyi sputnik po Volge (Kazan', 1884).
62. See Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia's Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton, 1991), 87-92.
63. V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Po Volge (St. Petersburg, 1877), iii.
64. V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Po Volge 1877, iii, Ibid.
65. V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Po Volge 1877, 104.
66. V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Po Volge 1877, Ibid., 96.
67. Lender, Na Volge, and Volzhskii sputnik (St. Petersburg, 1892).
68. Lender, Na Volge, 109-110
69. Lender, Na Volge, Ibid., 235.
70. For a summary of Russia's expanding urban population in the late imperial period, see Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernization and Revolution (London, 1983), 125-127
71. Stephen Lovell's, Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710 - 2000 (Ithaca, 2003) provides a comparable perspective on the impact of urbanization on Russian leisure patterns.
72. V. M. Sidorov, Volga (St. Petersburg, 1895), iii.
73. A. S. Razmadze, Volga (Kiev, 1896), 5.
74. Sidorov, Volga, 337.
75. E. P. Tsimmerman, Vniz po Volge (Moscow, 1896), 100.
76. See James Fenimore Cooper, "American and European Scenery Compared," in The Home Book of the Picturesque (Gainesville, Fla., 1967).
77. A. P. Subbotin, Volga i Voblgari (St. Petersburg, 1894), 4.
78. A. P. Valueva-Munt, Po velikoi russkoi reke (St. Petersburg, 1895), 64.
79. Razmadze, Volga, 3.
80. Razmadze, Volga, Ibid., 88.
81. E. A. Prcdtcchenskii, Na pamiať o Volge (St. Petersburg, 1892), 42-43.
82. On the various images of the peasant in late nineteenth-century Russia, see Cathy Frierson, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York, 1993).
83. See, for example, Barrell, The Idea of Landscape, or Green, The Spectacle of Nature.
84. P. Konchalovskii, Ot Moskυy do Arkhangel'ska: Po moskoυskogo-iaroslavsko-arkhangel'skoi zheleznoi dorogi (Moscow, 1897), viii.
85. See A. A. Fedorov-Davydov, Isaak Il''ich Levitan: Zhizn'i tvorchestvo (Moscow, 1966)
86. and Fedorov-Davydov, Isaak Il'ich Levitan: Dokument), Material); Bibliografiia (Moscow, 1966).
87. For a biography of Repin, see Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art (New York, 1990).
88. E. P. Vishniakov, Istoki Volgi: Nabroski perom i fotografúu (St. Petersburg, 1893).
89. M. P. Dmitriev, Peizazhi nizhegorodskogo Pσυolzh'ia: Fototipii s natury (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1894).
90. Russkoe Obshchestvo Turizma i Otcliiznovedeniia, Predlozhenie ob organizatsii ekskursii na Urale (Petrograd, 1916), 4-5.