Andreas Schonle. Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary Journey, 1790-1840.(Book Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-SEP-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. vii + 296.

Why study travel? In this informative monograph, constructed around select texts of the sentimentalist and romantic period, Andreas Schonle nominates the travelogue as a focus for several of Russia's perennial anxieties: us versus them, the security of borders and the freedom to cross them, ambivalence toward the culturally dominant West, the hugeness of a continental empire that contains within itself as many exotic Others as might any Abroad. He also asserts--although modestly--that as a subgenre, ironic travelogues provide excellent models for organizing narrative and, whatever their real-life itineraries, "inevitably lead to fiction" (202). Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky are cited among the practitioners. But genre history is a secondary concern. At the center of his study Schonle places the Russian writer's quest for authenticity.

The introduction lays out significant distinctions and watersheds. The first is between "being sent" (as are pilgrims, diplomats, students supported by the state) and "choosing to go"; the emergence of the elective tourist in the eighteenth century was a milestone in Russia's transformation from medieval to modern. With the voluntary tourist came debates on the moral usefulness of travel, accompanied by a shift from the private diary or confidential report to published venues. Once a public genre, travel writing began to foreground literary precedent (Sterne, Dupaty, Rousseau) and, of course, to dispute that highly self-conscious legacy, even as packaged and cleansed for the Russian reader. Where did the authenticity of the travel account lie: in the stance and mood of the traveler, or in the veracity of what was seen? In the actual itinerary, or in its fictional elaboration? Was the reality of the experience to be found in the "foreign sight," in the sensation aroused by the sight, or in the language of memory--often quite fictionalized--later applied to their interaction?

These are questions of a tall, even of an infinite order, and to his credit Shonle keeps his chosen material under taut paradigmatic control. His first chapter contrasts two famous master prototypes of travel from the Russian 1790s. The...

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