The Moscow/St. Petersburg binary shapes Russia’s symbolic geography. Moscow is the self-styled inheritor of Kyivan Rus’, the medieval Slavic state located in what is now Ukraine (where, at the time of writing, the Russian Federation is waging a bloody war of conquest). By “absorbing” the Kyivan heritage, the state now governed from Moscow has at times effected Ukraine’s symbolic erasure, moving the “center” of East Slavic culture five hundred miles to the east. And yet Moscow’s supposed centrality derives meaning largely from the peripheralness of anothercapital, St. Petersburg, foundedin 1704 by the coercively westernizing emperor Peter the Great. For two centuries Petersburg—a center situated on a geographic periphery, the capital of an outward-looking empire—was everything Moscow was not: new, bureaucratic, “western,” symbolically masculine, ethnically hybrid. This opposition has worked to dilute the meanings attached to “provincial” places, i.e., virtually all places located outside the two capitals butnotin exotic non-Russian borderlands like the Caucasus. Taking as examples Tatiana Tolstoya’s “Fakir” (1986, Moscow) and Evgeny Zamiatin’s “The Cave” (1920, Petersburg), this chapter examines how the Russian worldview—particularly Russians’ anxious perception of themselves as provincials—can inform World Literature debates around centers and peripheries.

Anne Lounsbery illuminates the dauntingly complex system of estates and ranks that stratified Russian life, and the emergence of the “splintered middle” that was Chekhov’s principal focus.

In Tolstoy’s time debates about sexuality and female emancipation (the “Woman Question”) were inseparable from fundamental decisions regarding how Russian society was to be organized. Were women to be maternal or not, educated or not, autonomous or not? Such questions were tied to thorny economic, religious, legal, and political issues. Tolstoy’s oeuvre reveals his intense engagement with contemporary debates, as well as his increasingly radical ideas about how such problems should be resolved. Anna Karenina is arguably among Tolstoy’s less extreme statements on sex and gender, yet it can be read to imply that a woman cannot sever the bonds of marriage and stay alive. The Kreutzer Sonata goes so far as to suggest that only radical chastity, even if it leads to humanity’s extinction, can free people from the degradation, commodification, and violence that are inevitable consequences of sexual relations. In What is Art? Tolstoy establishes a symbolic link between the sexual marketplace, the art marketplace, and finally all marketplaces – and thus, it seems, all of modern civilization.

“All these new ideas, reforms, and theories – it's all reached us out in the provinces, but to see everything and see it clearly, one must be in Petersburg”: thus does a character in Crime and Punishment (1866) explain what he hopes to gain from coming to the capital (6:115; Pt. 2, Ch. 5). And judging from Dostoevsky's own career, the author might well have concurred, for as much as Dostoevsky professed his love for the common people or hinted at the spiritual riches buried in the Russian countryside, he showed little inclination to remove himself from the center, that is, from St. Petersburg. Not only was the capital the seat of print culture and state power, it also seems to have struck Dostoevsky as the only point of view from which one might “see everything and see it clearly.” This attachment to the capital resulted not simply from the writer's personal inclinations, but rather from the particular relationship between center and periphery, capital and province, that obtained in Russian culture. The symbolic binary (center/periphery) maintained its power throughout the nineteenth century despite the fact that Russia actually had two capitals: after Peter the Great (1682–1725) moved the seat of government from Moscow to Petersburg in 1712, Moscow continued to be seen as a cultural and spiritual center and thus a capital in its own right.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, and especially during Dostoevsky's lifetime, provincial Russia was transformed. By the 1830s, transportation networks were growing, social mobility was slowly increasing, and more printed texts were beginning to circulate beyond Petersburg and Moscow. By mid-century, the traditional gentry's cultural influence was in decline and new intellectuals of non-noble origin were contributing more and more to public life, especially through journalism. After the debacle of the Crimean War (1853–6), the state turned its attention to modernization efforts, assuming (incorrectly) that much-needed economic and industrial reforms could be undertaken without triggering significant political or social change. The Great Reforms of the 1860s initiated truly radical transformations: the serfs were emancipated, the judicial and educational systems were restructured, censorship was relaxed, and zemstva* were established. By the 1870s, railroad networks were growing fast and an urban working class was taking shape. Literacy rates were rising steadily. Arguably, such changes had at least as much impact on provincial life as they did on the capitals.