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In Life Is Elsewhere, Anne Lounsbery shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called "the provinces"-a place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. Lounsbery looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has exercised such enduring power, and what role it plays in the larger symbolic geography that structures Russian literature's representation of the nation's space. Using a comparative approach, she brings to light fundamental questions that have long gone unasked: how to understand, for instance, the weakness of literary regionalism in a country as large as Russia? Why the insistence, from Herzen through Chekhov and beyond, that all Russian towns look the same?  In a literary tradition that constantly compared itself to a western European standard, Lounsbery argues, the problem of provinciality always implied difficult questions about the symbolic geography of the nation as a whole. This constant awareness of a far-off European model helps explain why the provinces, in all their supposed drabness and predictability, are a topic of such fascination for Russian writers-why these anonymous places are in effect so important and meaningful, notwithstanding the culture's nearly unremitting emphasis on their nullity and meaninglessness.

Russian literature --- Country life in literature. --- Regionalism in literature. --- Country life --- Regionalism --- Human geography --- Nationalism --- Interregionalism --- Rural life --- Manners and customs --- History and criticism. --- History --- Social aspects --- comparative literature, symbolic geography, empire in literature, genre studies, regionalism.

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"Author shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called "the provinces"--a place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow"--

Country life in literature. --- Country life --- Country life. --- Littérature régionale. --- Regionalism in literature. --- Regionalism --- Russian literature --- Russian literature. --- Régionalisme --- Vie rurale dans la littérature. --- History --- Social aspects --- Social aspects. --- History and criticism --- Aspect social --- Histoire --- 1800-1899. --- Russia.

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This is the first volume to consistently examine Soviet engagement with world literature from multiple institutional and disciplinary perspectives: intellectual history, literary history and theory, comparative literature, translation studies, diaspora studies. Its emphasis is on the lessons one could learn from the Soviet attention to world literature; as such, the present volume makes a significant contribution to current debates on world literature beyond the field of Slavic and East European Studies and foregrounds the need to think of world literature pluralistically, in a manner that is not restricted by the agendas of Anglophone academe.

Soviet literature --- History and criticism. --- Foreign influences.