Writing at Russias Border

"Writing at Russia's Border argues that Russian literature needs to be re-examined in light of the fact that many of its most important nineteenth-century texts are peripheral, not in significance but in provenance." "Katya Hokanson makes the case that the fluid and ever-changing cultural and linguistic boundaries of Russia's border regions profoundly influenced the nation's literature, posing challenges to stereotypical or territorially based conceptions of Russia's imperial, military, and cultural identity. Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, set in European Russia, is no less dependent on the perspectives of those living at the edges of the Russian Empire than is Tolstoy's The Cossacks, which is explicitly set on Russia's border and has also become central to the Russian canon. Hokanson cites the influence of these and other 'peripheral' texts as proof that Russia's national identity was dependent upon the experiences of people living in the border areas of an expanding empire. Produced in a time of cultural contrast and exchange, the literature of the periphery represented a negotiation of different views of Russian identity, a negotiation that was necessary ultimately even to literature produced in the major cities." "Writing at Russia's Border upends popular ideas of national cultural production and is a fascinating study of the social implications of nineteenth-century Russian literature."--Jacket.