A Nation Astray by Ingrid Anne Kleespies

Author:Ingrid Anne Kleespies [Kleespies, Ingrid Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Literary Criticism, Russian & Former Soviet Union, Political Science, Political Ideologies, Nationalism & Patriotism
ISBN: 9781501756689
Google: xf7-DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2012-11-15T03:43:55+00:00

Domesticating Siberia

Goncharov’s six-month journey across Siberia comprises the subject of the final section of Frigate Pallas.25 Much about this section of the book, set on the soil of what is at once home for Goncharov and yet, at the same time, an unfamiliar and even a foreign space, has been overlooked or oversimplified by scholars. Goncharov’s treatment of Siberia is complex and includes a nuanced consideration of the topoi of home and homeland that engages with a discourse of homelessness-at-home, or permanent travel. These issues are framed in Frigate Pallas in terms of the narrator’s negotiation with the frontier, his encounter with a distinctively Russian provinciality, and his engagement with what might be termed the literary “domestic familiar,” or well-known ethos of provincial Russia such as that found in Gogol’s oeuvre. In Frigate Pallas, Siberia is written into an existing literary paradigm that describes heartland Russia; but in this paradigm the center—home—is impossible to find. Ironically, this implicit homelessness-at-home is the most familiar aspect of Russian life in Siberia.

The last section of Frigate Pallas is set in Siberia because Goncharov’s journey did not end as planned, due to the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854. Goncharov and his Russian companions were forced to leave Japan but could not sail back to Russia the way they had come via Africa and Europe, nor could they continue on to the United States, as they originally intended. Instead, they were taken to the coast of Siberia, where they disembarked at the mouth of the Amur River. From there, they made their way back to Saint Petersburg over land, a laborious process that took several months. For the Oblomov-like traveler, whose presence has been felt throughout Frigate Pallas, Siberia is a space that is at once home-like and undomestic, even anti-domestic. It is made familiar precisely by a reencounter with the problematic nature of home and domesticity in the Russian context. The ambiguous space of Siberia is configured in Frigate Pallas in a number of ways: as an imperial frontier, as the extension of an imagined Russian homeland, and, contrastingly, as the least “homey” of Russian spaces, marked as it is by the absence of the estate system. The earlier concern in Frigate Pallas over an acute sense of the absence of home and homeland is again brought to the fore in the context of Russian expansion into Siberia, a space that occupied a varied role in Russian national-imperial consciousness, where it was viewed alternately as an extension of the homeland, as a frontier, and as a colony.26 Importantly, as Tolz notes, Russians of the mid-nineteenth century did not draw a firm physical or psychological distinction between the nation and its imperial territories. Imperial expansion was conceived of as an organic expansion of the nation-state into seemingly empty, organically Russian, territory.27 The tensions inherent in this situation are readily apparent in Goncharov’s text, where the question of Siberia’s place in Russian national space is very much at stake.

What does the home-focused narrator of

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