This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia

Christopher Ely. This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity Imperial Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. xi, 278 pp. Bibliography. Figures. Notes. Index. $42.00, cloth.Russia's evolving sense of national identity has received much attention both Western and Russian scholarship recent years. Stemming from Westernizer-Slavophile polemics of mid-nineteenth century, this topic encompasses not only Russians' view of themselves and their land, but also perennial question of Russia's relation to West. Christopher Ely's book represents another contribution to this discussion, an area still relatively untouched by Western cultural historians. The basic premise of this ambitious study suggests that Russians assimilated and then modified Western perceptions of landscape order to interpret and appreciate their own meagre nature. The title, incidentally, comes from Fedor Tiutchev's well-known poem Eti bednye seleniia, eta skudnaia priroda. Although Ely notes preface that he decided not to include Russian originals of translated passages in interests of space and pacing (p. xi), that decision seems questionable to this reviewer, especially regard to few significant poetry excerpts.In book's introduction author gives frequent and helpful guides to his intentions, primary among them an examination of the long process by which image of Russian rural landscape was invented and reinvented until it achieved its standard aesthetic form and special emotional force within Imperial Russian culture (p.5). The reader subsequently discovers that for purposes of this volume late imperial Russian culture extends only to end of nineteenth century-and not even to very end. This is a defensible boundary, yet it should be noted that much happens within this theme during final two decades of imperial Russian culture.To define a system from which Russian landscape could be comprehended and projected nineteenth-century art, Ely offers a concise examination of Western perceptions of landscape as an aesthetic object, beginning with Renaissance Italy and focusing on Claude Lorrain, whose idealized landscapes, one might add, had a profound effect on Dostoevskii. (Courbet is conspicuous by his absence from Ely's introductory discussion.) Russian artists schooled themselves Western modes of representation before reacting against them order to address Russia's specificity. At same time, perceptions of Russian land as flat and uninspired (perceptions from Western visitors as well from Russians who had travelled Europe) led artists, writers, critics Russia to reinterpret ideas of picturesque and poetic ways that would fathom underlying beauty of Russian land-a beauty linked, as it were, to authentic moral and spiritual values.In tracing development of an aesthetic vision of Russia's quiet landscape, Ely examines literary texts-from Pushkin, Lermontov, Kol'tsov and Tiutchev to Aksakov (the pastoral) and Turgenev. …

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