Academic Studies Press Contested Russian Tourism: Cosmopolitanism, Nation, and Empire in the Nineteenth Century (Imperial Encounters in Russian History)

Review “In this engagingly written contribution to the Academic Studies Press series on ‘Imperial Encounters in Russian History’, literary scholar Susan Layton takes the ‘roots and routes’ approach to analysing the relationship between travel and identity in the long nineteenth century. ... 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. ... How will scholars of tourism profit from a book whose singular gaze comes from the Russian perspective? First, parsing out the tourist from such a broad scope of texts in which travel largely appears at the margins of the plot, Layton enhances the value of such a methodology. Second, her spacious time frame allows the reader to assess both contingencies and continuities. … [F]or Russianists, taking the ‘tourism turn’ opens a new window, to borrow from Peter the Great’s metaphor for introducing transnationalism, for viewing imperial encounters.”― Louise McReynolds, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Journal of Tourism History Product Description null 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. Although the first two lived abroad for a good portion of their creative lives, they never allowed their Russian identity to be subsumed by their continental surroundings. True cosmopolitans need not sacrifice a core national identity through their interactions with Others." ― Louise McReynolds, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Journal of Tourism History “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) “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 About the Author Susan Layton is a research associate at the Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasian et centre-européen (CERCEC) in Paris. She i