Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. CONTENTS vii
3. Acknowledgments ix
4. Note on Transliteration and Translation xi
5. 1. Geography, History, Trope: Facts on the Ground 1
6. 2. Before the Provinces: Pastoral and Anti-Pastoral in Pushkin’s Countryside 33
7. 3. Inventing Provincial Backwardness, or “Everything is Barbarous and Horrid” (Herzen, Sollogub, and Others) 54
8. 4. “This is Paris itself!”: Gogol in the Town of N 79
9. 5. “I Do Beg of You, Wait, and Compare!”: Goncharov, Belinsky, and Provincial Taste 100
10. 6. Back Home: The Provincial Lives of Turgenev’s Cosmopolitans 119
11. 7. Transcendence Deferred: Women Writers in the Provinces 142
12. 8. Melnikov and Leskov, or What is Regionalism in Russia? 164
13. 9. Centering and Decentering in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy 186
14. 10. “Everything Here is Accidental”: Chekhov’s Geography of Meaninglessness 208
15. 11. In the End: Shchedrin, Sologub, and Terminal Provinciality 229
16. 12. Conclusion: The Provinces in the Twentieth Century 243
17. List of Abbreviations 257
18. Notes 259
19. Bibliography 317
20. Index 333