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.
Layton is thoroughly familiar with the formidable body of tourism scholarship both within and beyond Russia. Indeed her introduction provides an overview of this scholarship, much of which comes out of the English and French traditions and is fueled by debates over tourism's ideological underpinnings and implications. How is a tourist distinct from a traveler? Does engaging in tourism foster “true cosmopolitanism,” or does it merely encourage a sense of superiority over those who are the objects of the tourist's gaze? Why do tourists so often express contempt for other tourists? Does seeking familiar comforts on the road constitute a moral weakness?
Similar questions animate many of the primary texts that are Layton's focus. Famous travel accounts by Nikolai Karamzin, Lev Tolstoi, Fedor Dostoevskii and Aleksandr Herzen staked out polemical positions on the value or non-value of tourism, and lesser authors took up these arguments in their own work. As Layton writes, “Russian tourism was a divisive pursuit setting cosmopolitans against nationalists and homebodies, metropolitans against ‘provincials,’ and men against women” (6). Over and over we see Russian writers doing what those from other traditions (most notably the English) were doing as well: working to set themselves apart from the vulgar or ignorant people—sometimes their own compatriots, sometimes those from other countries—who were somehow doing tourism wrong.
Contested Russian Tourism takes a straightforward approach to its object of study, organizing texts by historical period and situating them in relationship to major events. While it takes note of literary periodization and the ways in which literary movements (Enlightenment, Byronism/Romanticism, realism, decadence) affected writing about tourism, its main thrust is always historicist. Russia's brutal conquest of the Caucasus, nationalism's intensification in the post-Napoleonic period, the shock of defeat after the Crimean War, the 1863 Polish uprising, the rise of consumer culture in the last third of the century, the political and economic chaos of the late imperial period—all are reflected in attitudes toward tourism.
The book's clear organization is signaled by a usefully detailed table of contents, in which three main parts (“Becoming Tourists,” “Shocks of Modernization,” and “Embourgeoisement and Its Enemies”) are further divided into subchapters dedicated either to individual works or to groupings of related works. The author devotes roughly equal time to tourism in Europe and in Russia's “own” southern imperial borderlands, with some attention to the Volga River and a glancing look at Central Asia. Layton's expertise (she is the author of a highly respected study of Russian literature and empire) is reflected in the current work's strong sections on Crimea and the Caucasus (especially chapter 11, “Tatars and the Tourist Boom in the Crimea”). Her analysis of Evgeny Markov's Sketches of the Crimea (1884), for instance, underscores the close relationship between Russian nationalism and imperialism. Writing about how Crimea tourism served to “[promote] Russian national solidarity through remembrance of the Crimean War,” Layton notes that Markov—like Vissarion Belinskii and many others—enthusiastically parroted an idea that today resonates in sinister ways: the claim that Crimea was “bought with Russian blood” (348–49).
The book's generous footnotes and bibliography point toward a wealth of resources for further scholarship. Given the great quantity of material that is covered, a more complete index would be appreciated; however, this shortcoming is mitigated by the searchable version available online. Contested Russian Tourism will be a resource for all scholars of the Russian nineteenth century, well beyond those with a particular interest in tourism.
