Contested Russian Tourism

Susan Layton is a research associate at the Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasian et centre-européen (CERCEC) in Paris. She is the author of Russian Literature and Empire. Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (1994, ebook 2011) and numerous articles on nineteenth-century Russian literature.

Susan Layton is a research associate at the Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasien et centre-européen (CERCEC) in Paris. She is the author of Russian Literature and Empire. Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (1994, ebook 2011) and numerous articles on nineteenth-century Russian literature.

"[Layton’s] elucidation of the contexts and interrelationships of her chosen texts displays a remarkable command of detail that provides enriching new insights, even for readers well-versed in Russian literary history…Well written, meticulously edited, and provided with a delightfully detailed index, the book sheds new light on an under-studied topic: the development of a commercialized tourist-service sector in the late imperial Russian period."

— Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (translated from German)

“Susan Layton’s Contested Russian Tourism is a significant contribution to our knowledge about tourism’s role in Russian culture. Sweeping in scope, the book covers a range of genres (novels, stories, memoirs, travel notes, narrative poems, and personal letters); it analyzes texts fictional and non-fictional, familiar and obscure, high-brow and popular, serious and light-hearted. Proceeding in chronological order from the eighteenth century through the very end of the imperial period, Layton develops what might fairly be described as a comprehensive survey of Russian (pre-Soviet) primary texts about the experience and phenomenon of tourism. In doing so she is able to illuminate how these writings—so various in ideology, genre, and intended audience— serve as reflections on Russia’s own place in the world: it is abundantly clear that in writing about being in other places (whether those places were deemed more or less ‘civilized’ than Russia itself), tourists were always writing about their homeland…Contested Russian Tourism will be a resource for all scholars of the Russian nineteenth century, well beyond those with a particular interest in tourism.”

— Anne Lounsbery, Slavic Review

“One of the major contributions of this book lies in how Layton does not limit her subjects to their experiences in Western Europe, and by adding the empire’s exotic regions that beckoned to travellers, the Caucasus and Crimea, she adds to our knowledge of the multiple layers that constructed the imperial imagination. Readers already familiar with Alexander Pushkin’s and Mikhail Lermontov’s Romantic and Orientalist fascinations with the Caucasus will meet the antithesis of their Byronic heroes: Lidia Veselitskaia’s narcissistic, adulterous Mimi. . . Despite the Tolstoyan anathema to the sybaritic traveller who can only appreciate culture as a commodity fetish, Layton singles out three writers who best conform to her more expansive notion of a tourist as an agent of cultural reciprocity: Ivan Turgenev, Alexander Herzen, and Anton Chekhov.”

“This very detailed account of tourist travelogues and works of literature featuring tourism creates a revealing continuum between now fairly obscure writers and extremely well-known ones. Susan Layton provides a synthesizing narrative about the course of the nineteenth century seen through the lens of travel. The practice of, and debate over, tourism sheds new light on major literary and cultural debates, particularly between conservatives and radicals. … The real payoff comes when canonical works are seen in a new context, particularly texts by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy.”

— Katya Hokanson, University of Oregon, Russian Review (October 2022: Vol. 81, No. 4)

“Particulièrement intéressantes sont les pages où l’auteur met à nu les polémiques ouvertes et feutrées, parfois d’oeuvre littéraire à oeuvre littéraire, auxquelles se livrent, par exemple, les pourfendeurs du tourisme bourgeois consumériste et repu et les défenseurs romantiques ou postromantiques du tourisme culturel, censé élever la « spiritualité » (duhovnost´) des élites russes. Contrepoint de la vulgarité et de la recherche des plaisirs bas, l’art, notamment la peinture et par conséquent les musées européens, occupe une place de choix dans toute cette littérature…”

— Wladimir Berelowitch, Cahiers du Monde Russe

“Of special interest are sections where the author brings to light overt or muted polemics between literary texts devoted, for instance, to lambasting the consumerist, satiated bourgeois tourist, as opposed to the romantic or post-romantic defense of cultural tourism as a purported means of enriching the Russian elite’s inner life. In counterpoint to vulgarity and the quest for low-brow pleasures, art has a privileged place in this public discourse which foregrounds painting and, consequently, western Europe’s museums.”

— Wladimir Berelowitch, Cahiers du Monde Russe (excerpt translated from the French)

“Susan Layton plumbs travelogues, letters, novels, stories, humor, and commentaries to probe why and how nineteenth-century Russians traveled. Her rogue’s gallery of characters features the bookish and the boorish; cultural luminaries who opined on travel for the new middle classes, and tourists who simply dressed up and went. The book’s publication during our twenty-first century pandemic lockdown is timely—a reminder of the historical importance of expanded opportunities to travel and the imprint of travel on the Russian identity.”

—Jeffrey Brooks, Johns Hopkins University, author of The Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks