The Provinces in Russian Fiction

Abstract

At the beginning of the 18th century, Peter I and his advisers sought to transform the governance of the Russian Empire. They turned to examples drawn from other states and imported terminology for the new administration they planned. Some of this new vocabulary never made it far beyond the project stage (for example, the Swedish inspiration of calling a local military commander the landsgevding). The loanword guberniia, meanwhile, was a great success, used to describe the Russian Empire’s largest units of administration (its territorial “governments”) right through 1917. A middling fate awaited the kindred calque provintsiia. Employed in the Petrine era to create smaller, more manageable divisions (or provinces) within the gubernii, provintsiia was ultimately discarded by Catherine II. Catherine right-sized her territorial governments not by subdividing them but by shrinking them and increasing their number, thereby superannuating the original Russian “province.”1 That might have been it for provintsiia, which could have shared the fate of many other imperial projects: to be given to the archive to be forgotten forever. Instead, as Anne Lounsbery shows in this wondrous and incisive study, a much grander destiny awaited “the provinces” in modern Russian culture. Life Is Elsewhere explores “the process by which nineteenth-century Russian writers imagined the provinces into being” (243), taking an abandoned administrative term of art and making it into one of the central tropes