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The Origins of Russian Scenery: Volga River Tourism and Russian Landscape Aesthetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Christopher Ely
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Abstract

The essential idea of landscape, that a section of terrain can be appreciated as a visual or aesthetic object, is largely a phenomenon of modern history, tied to processes such as urbanization and the development of tourism. Although the appreciation of landscape in Russia was influenced by European aesthetics, Russia developed a unique approach to its own natural environment, and the Volga River played an important role in that process. When steamship tourism appeared on the Volga in the late nineteenth century, the river became a crucial location for the articulation of a new, scenic aesthetic. But this aesthetic competed with earlier views of Russian landscape, which held that the simple and unspectacular character of the native countryside contrasted favorably with the overly picturesque and inauthentic landscapes of western Europe. Images of the Volga that emerged in guidebooks, travelogues, and visual media took shape in attempts to negotiate between the touristic impulse to appreciate beautiful scenery and more established conceptions of Russian nature as appealing precisely in its lack of picturesqueness.

Type
Research Article
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 62 , Issue 4: Tourism and Travel in Russia and the Soviet Union , Winter 2003 , pp. 666 - 682
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2003

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References

This statement was first used by V I. Ragozin as the epigraph to his multivolume study entitled Volga (St. Petersburg, 1880). It was printed earlier in Tolstoi, N. S., Zavolzhskaia chast' Makar'evskago uezda hlizhegorodskoi gub. (Moscow, 1857), 1:118.Google Scholar

1 For a more extensive description of the Chernetsovs’ journey, see Ely, Christopher, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 2002), 76–78.Google Scholar The present discussion of the Chernetsovs derives in large measure from this text.

2 Cited in Smirnov, G. V., “Grigorii Grigorovich Chernetsov i Nikanor Grigorovich Chernetsov,” in Leonov, A. I., ed., Russkoe iskusstvo: Ocherki o zhizni i tvorchestve khudozhnikov (Moscow, 1958), 562.Google Scholar

3 Ibid.

4 Overviews of picturesque travel in Europe and the United States during the early nineteenth century include Withey, Lynne, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750 to 1915 (New York, 1997)Google Scholar, and Sears, John F., Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1989).Google Scholar

5 The Chernetsovs 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 Korobochko, A. I. and Liubovnyi, V. Ia., “Panorama Volgi akademikov G. i N. Chernetsovykh,“ in Grigorii, and Chernetsov, Nikanor, Puteshestviepo Volge (Moscow, 1970).Google Scholar

6 Sollogub, V. A., Tarantas (Moscow, 1955), 13.Google Scholar 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.

7 Crandell, Gina, Nature Piclorialized: “The. View” in Landscape History (Baltimore, 1993), 3.Google Scholar

8 Among theoretical works on the historical development of landscape aesdietics, English-language scholarship has dominated in recent years. See, for example, Andrews, Malcolm, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760-1800 (Stanford, 1989);Google Scholar Barrell, John, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (Cambridge, Eng., 1972);Google Scholar Bermingham, Ann, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (Berkeley, 1986);Google Scholar Cosgrove, Denis, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Totowa, N.J., 1984);Google Scholar Daniels, Stephen, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Princeton, 1993);Google Scholar Green, Nicholas, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester, 1990);Google Scholar Miller, Angela, Empire of the Eye: Landscape, Ref/resentation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, 1993);Google Scholar Novak, Barbara, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 (New York, 1980);Google Scholar and Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory (New York, 1995).Google Scholar

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11 Chernetsov, Puteshestuie po Volge, 7.

12 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.

13 Chernetsov, Puteshestvie po Volge, 7.

14 Ibid., 32.

15 For a history of estate parks and gardens, see Roosevelt, Priscilla, Life on the Russian Country Estate (New Haven, 1995).Google Scholar See also Likhachev, Poeziia sadov, and the series entitled, Russkaia usad'ba: Sbornik Obshchestva izucheniia russkoi usad'by (Moscow-Rybinsk, 1994-2001).

16 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 dian 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 Chernetsovs' perspective would have altered as well. In this article, I am only using the published version of the original notes.

17 Ibid., 107-9.

18 See, for example, Matskevich, D. I., Putevyie zametki (Kiev, 1856);Google Scholar Shishkina, O. P., Zamelki i vospominaniia russkoi piiteshestvennitsy (St. Petersburg, 1843);Google Scholar Passek, Vadim, Putevyia ocherki Vadima (St. Petersburg, 1838)Google Scholar and Ocherki Rossii (Moscow, 1838-1840); and Shevyrev, Stepan, Poezdka v Kirillo-Belozerskii monastyr': Vakatsionnye dni professora S. Shevyreva v 1847godu (Moscow, 1850).Google Scholar 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.

19 I. K. Babst, for example, in Rechnaia oblast' Volgi (Moscow, 1852), took some of his information from a German study entitled Historisch-geographischeDarstellungdes Stormssystems der Wolga (1839). 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).

20 Babst, I. K., “Volga,” in Semenov, D. D., ed., Otchiznovedenie: Rossiia po razskazam puleshestvennikov i uchenym izsledovaniam (St. Petersburg, 1866), 2:39.Google Scholar

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24 Molchanov, A. N., Po Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1876), 93.Google Scholar To sweeten the appeal of this trip, Molchanov also proposed bringing along an orchestra!

25 See Durkin, Andrew, Sergei Aksakov and Russian Pastoral (New Brunswick, N.J., 1983), 84–85.Google Scholar Also Aksakov’s, S. T. “Zapiski ob uzhen'e,” in Mashinskii, S., ed., Sobranie sochinenii vpiati tomakh (Moscow, 1966), 4:288–89.Google Scholar

26 Ragozin, Volga, 2:120.

27 Molchanov, Po Rossii, 92.

28 Kuchin, Ia. P., Putevoditel' po Volge (Saratov, 1865), 44.Google Scholar 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. See Babst, I. and Pobedonostsev, K., Pis'ma o putesheslvii Gosudaria Naslednika Tsesarevicha po Rossii ot Peterburga do Kryma (Moscow, 1864), 264–65.Google Scholar

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33 From an advertisement found at the end of S. Monastyrskii, Illiustrirovannyi sputnik po Volge (Kazan', 1884).

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35 Nemirovich-Danchenko, V. I., Po Volge (St. Petersburg, 1877), iii.Google Scholar

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., 104.

38 Ibid., 96.

39 Lender, Na Volge, and Volzhskii sputnik (St. Petersburg, 1892).

40 Lender, Mi Vo/ge, 109–10.

41 Ibid., 235.

42 For a summary of Russia’s expanding urban population in the late imperial period, see Rogger, Hans, Russia in the Age of Modernization and Revolution (London, 1983), 125–27.Google Scholar Lovell’s, Stephen, Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710-2000 (Ithaca, 2003)Google Scholar provides a comparable perspective on the impact of urbanization on Russian leisure patterns.

43 Sidorov, V. M., Volga (St. Petersburg, 1895), iii.Google Scholar

44 Razmadze, A. S., Volga (Kiev, 1896), 5.Google Scholar

45 Sidorov, Volga, 337.

46 Tsimmerman, E. P., Vnizpo Volge (Moscow, 1896), 100.Google Scholar

47 See Cooper, James Fenimore, “American and European Scenery Compared,” in The Home Book of the Picturesque (Gainesville, Fla., 1967).Google Scholar

48 Subbotin, A. P., Volga i Volgari (St. Petersburg, 1894), 4.Google Scholar

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50 Razmadze, Volga, 3.

51 Ibid., 88.

52 Predtechenskii, E. A., Napamiat'o Volge (St. Petersburg, 1892), 42–43.Google Scholar

53 On the various images of the peasant in late nineteenth-century Russia, see Frierson, Cathy, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York, 1993).Google Scholar

54 See, for example, Barrell, The Idea of Landscape, or Green, The Spectacle of Nature,

55 Konchalovskii, P., Ot Moskvy do Arkhangel'ska: Po moskovskogo-iaroslavskoarkhangel'skoi zheleznoi dorogi (Moscow, 1897), viii.Google Scholar

56 See Fedorov-Davydov, A. A., Isaak Il'ich Levitan: Zhizn' i tvorcliestvo (Moscow, 1966)Google Scholar, and Fedorov-Davydov, , Isaak Il'ich Levitan: Dokumenly, Materialy, Bibliografiia (Moscow, 1966).Google Scholar

57 For a biography of Repin, see Valkenier, Elizabeth Kridl, Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

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60 Russkoe Obshchestvo Turizma i Otchiznovedeniia, Predlozhenie ob organizatsii ekskursii na Urale (Petrograd, 1916), 4 – 5.