Making Empty Provinces: Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment Regionalism in Russian Provincial Journals

REGION: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia 4(1): 7–29, 2015.

Making Empty Provinces: Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment Regionalism in Russian Provincial Journals

Susan Smith-Peter

This article examines how the idea of Enlightenment regionalism arose and was received in the provinces. Enlightenment regionalism denied the speci-ficity or authenticity of space outside the capitals. Circles around provincial governors and new educational institutions adapted these ideas in four eigh-teenth-century journals printed in the provinces. Influenced by the genre of topographical descriptions and by the provincial reforms of 1775, these groups saw peripheral space as a source of raw materials, not of meaning, and made empty provinces by erasing specificity and inserting universality.

Under Catherine the Great, the Enlightenment reached the provinces. Russian Enlightenment thinkers believed in the perfectibility of the individual and so-ciety and valorized the universal. The German, French, and British Enlighten-ments were received in different ways at various times in Russia, but the sense that Russia needed to measure up to a universal standard was pervasive.1 New governmental institutions and a pre-existing provincial culture interacted to create a new provincial print culture in the late eighteenth century. Four pro-vincial journals were published during Catherine’s reign and show us how the provincial public sought to become enlightened by transcending the province.

Enlightenment regionalism applied the Enlightenment belief in the pri-macy of the universal to the regions, thus denying them historical meaning due to their irreducible specificity.2 Circles that formed around provincial gov-ernors after Catherine the Great’s 1775 reform of provincial administration studied the province. Students and teachers in the new schools aimed at bring-

1 Simon Dixon, The Modernisation of Russia, 1676–1825 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1999); Marc Raeff, Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994).

2 For other instances of universalism, see Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 35, and Alexander Martin, Enlightened Metropolis: Constructing Imperial Moscow, 1762–1855 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

8 Susan Smith-Peter

ing Enlightenment to Russia’s far-flung regions. Both of these groups wanted to remake the provinces and saw Russia’s vast spaces as fundamentally empty but for their natural and human resources.

And yet, the ideology of Enlightenment regionalism was just that—an ide-ology. Russia’s regions, especially the Russian North and Siberia, had a strong sense of regional identity from at least the seventeenth century.3 However, the idea of the emptiness of Russia’s provinces was given artistic expression by Nikolai Gogol and is still influential today.4 Calling the provinces unenlight-ened made Russia’s capitals seem enlightened and thus part of the West. This article explores how Enlightenment regionalism made empty provinces, first by showing how the bureaucratization of the provinces under Catherine the Great erased earlier understandings of the regions as sacred, and then by fol-lowing the traces of that erasure in eighteenth-century provincial journals.

This work builds upon a new body of literature that amounts to a new provincial turn, which sees residents of the provinces as subjects, not objects, of their own history.5 In eighteenth-century Russia, certain regions were in-tellectual centers, with presses, educated circles, and publications.6 Such re-gions were exceptions, to be sure, but their very existence brings into ques-tion long-lasting dualities in Russian history: the center and the provinces, 3 Daniel Waugh, Istoriia odnoi knigi: Viatka i “ne-sovremennost’” v russkoi kul’ture

Petrov skogo vremeni (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003); Valerie Kivelson, Car-tographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Itha-ca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

4 Anne Lounsbery, “’No, this is not the provinces!’: Provincialism, Authenticity, and Russianness in Gogol’s Day,” Russian Review 64 (April 2005): 259–80.

5 Katherine Pickering Antonova, An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), O. Glagoleva and I. Shirle, eds., Dvorianstvo, vlast’, i obshchestvo v provintsial’noi Rossii XVIII veka (Mos-cow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2012); John Randolph, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-sity Press, 2007); Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). For longer overviews of related works, see Susan Smith-Peter, “How to Write a Region: Local and Regional Historiography,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian His-tory 5, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 527–42; Susan Smith-Peter, “Bringing the Provinces into Focus: Subnational Spaces in the Recent Historiography of Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 835–48; Catherine Evuthov, Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nine-teenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). This work is also connected to the spatial turn in Russian history. A good introduc-tion to that literature can be found in Mark Bassin, Christopher Ely, and Melissia Barksdale, eds., Space, Place, and Power in Modern Russia: Essays in the New Spatial History (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010).

6 N. Piksanov, Oblastnye kul’turnye gnezda (Moscow: Gosudarstvenoe izdatel’ stvo, 1928); N. M. Iniushkin, Provintsial’naia kul’tura: Vzgliad iznutri (Penza: GUK, 2004); A. A. Sevast’ianova, ed., Provintsial’noe kul’turnoe gnezdo (1778–1920-e gody): Sbornik statei i materialov (Riazan’: NTPS, 2005).

9Making Empty Provinces

enlightenment and backwardness.7 Provincial readers made up one-third of the readership in eighteenth-century Russia, with Moscow and St. Petersburg accounting for the other two-thirds.8 The provinces were not monolithic and some show a regional identity from the seventeenth century.9

The question of the Enlightenment is central to the historiography of the modern era. Peter Gay connected it to modernization and democratization, while others argued that its focus on the universal led to totalitarianism.10 More recent work has argued for multiple Enlightenments.11 The Russian Enlighten-ment then becomes a paradigmatic one, as it is a composite Enlightenment made of preexisting Russian influences, as well as from France, the Germanies, and Great Britain.12 One scholar has argued that the Enlightenment itself was generated out of the tensions between center and periphery.13 Only recently have works begun to integrate the provinces into the larger narrative.14 Such work is important, as one recent work has argued that the 1760s was the peak of Enlightenment activity in Russia’s capitals, while in the provinces it was the 1790s, as we will see.15 This article also builds upon the recent work of scholars working on empire, who have argued that the empire had multiple logics.16 But both the Russian heartland of Iaroslavl’ and Siberia saw the same need to transcend the locale. Similarly, Willard Sunderland notes that under Catherine 7 For a sustained critique of these old but less-than-useful dualities, see Glagoleva

and Shirle, Dvorianstvo.8 G. Iu. Samarin, Chitatel’ v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII veka po spiskam podpischikov

(Moscow: MGUP, 2000), 207.9 Kivelson, Cartographies; Judith Pallot and Denis J. B. Shaw, Landscape and Settlement

in Romanov Russia, 1613–1917 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).10 For an overview, see Annelien de Dijn, “The Politics of Enlightenment: From Peter

Gay to Jonathan Israel,” The Historical Journal 55, no. 3 (2012): 785–805.11 J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2001–5); Richard Butterwick, Simon Davies, and Gabriel Sanchez Espinosa, eds., Peripheries of the Enlightenment (Oxford: SVEC, 2008).

12 Paul Dukes, “The Russian Enlightenment,” in The Enlightenment in National Con-text, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 176–267; Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Religion and Enlightenment in Cather-inian Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013).

13 Michael Kugler, “Provincial Intellectuals: Identity, Patriotism, and Enlightened Peripheries,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 37 (Summer 1996): 156–73.

14 Michael Schippan, Die Aufklärung in Russland im 18. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012).

15 Simon Dixon, “’Prosveshchenie’: Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” in Butterwick, Peripheries, 229–49.

16 Jane Burbank and Mark von Hagen, “Coming into the Territory: Uncertainty and Empire,” in Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930, ed. Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatolyi Remnev (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 1–29.

10 Susan Smith-Peter

the Great, an era of high territoriality spurred officials to unify and control the regions.17

Two of the most vibrant provincial towns were Iaroslavl’ in central Rus-sia and Tobol’sk in Western Siberia, where the first provincial journals were published. These towns benefited from preexisting material and intellectual conditions, as well as from Catherinian reforms. In 1775, Catherine introduced a series of provincial reforms to avoid the chaos that had resulted from the recent Pugachev Rebellion, when the government had lost control of a sig-nificant amount of territory to an army of Cossacks and various rebels. The reforms thus sought to create a more powerful government presence in the provinces.18 They also helped to create the conditions for the rise of provin-cial print culture. The reforms established local commissions of public welfare (prikazy obshchestvennogo prizreniia), which operated poorhouses, fed the hun-gry, and were an important source of financial support for the first provincial periodicals.19

The 1775 reforms gave the governors more authority; they became the cen-ter of provincial educated society. The governors were chosen, not from the local nobility, but rather from central bureaucrats. Most served for less than ten years. In order to have sufficient information, a governor needed to work with nobles, educated clergy, and well-known merchants. Governors could establish presses, as happened in Saratov. In 1783, Catherine the Great allowed private individuals to open presses. These new institutions created the infra-structure for provincial periodicals.

Several factors were necessary for provincial periodicals to emerge. First was a preexisting historical, literary, and religious manuscript tradition, as was the case in both Iaroslavl’ and Tobol’sk. Second was the presence of a pa-per factory. In Tobol’sk, the owner of the paper factory also printed and helped finance the periodicals. This may help explain why three journals were pub-lished in Tobol’sk and only one in Iaroslavl’. Third, there had to be a private printing press. Fourth, a governor needed to act as an enlightened protector due to censorship. Fifth, the commission of public welfare had to support the periodical. Sixth, a school, either religious or secular, had to provide writers and readers.

These were the minimal conditions for the emergence of provincial pe-riodicals. Not all of them derived from the 1775 reforms. Some were preex-

17 Willard Sunderland, “Imperial Space: Territorial Thought and Practice in the Eigh-teenth Century,” in Burbank, von Hagen, and Remnev, Russian Empire, 33–66.

18 Glagoleva and Shirle, Dvorianstvo; Robert E. Jones, The Emancipation of the Rus-sian Nobility, 1762–1785 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973); Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981); N. V. Sereda, Reforma upravleniia Ekateriny Vtoroi (Moscow: Pamiatniki istoricheskoi mysli, 2004).

19 Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 139.


isting factors, while others, particularly the secular schools, came into being after 1775. If any one factor was missing, the obstacles were too great. This can help explain why Irkutsk, in contrast to Tobol’sk, failed to publish periodicals. Irkutsk had all of the necessary preconditions aside from a private printing press,20 which meant its vibrant local manuscript culture could not become print culture. Both Iaroslavl’ and Tobol’sk were exceptional provincial towns. And yet, the periodicals that emerged there were based on a denial of that ex-ceptionality and an assertion that these spaces were empty. In order to become someplace, they first had to be no place.

The reception and adaptation of European culture in Russia’s regions in the late eighteenth century has been the subject of study for more than a cen-tury. Classic works on Catherine’s provincial reforms tend to focus on institu-tional and legal history.21 Scholars have long seen these reforms as the source of a new, more European culture among the nobility in the provinces.22 As for provincial journals of the time, older works tended to focus on a detailed nar-rative of their founding and contents.23 More recently, historians have placed these periodicals within the larger cultural context of the interaction between provincial and central culture.24 However, no one has yet outlined how new Enlightenment ideas of space were received in Russia’s provinces during the eighteenth century or how this new way of seeing regions worked to erase their specificity, which had been celebrated a century earlier.

20 A. P. Okladnikov et al., eds., Ocherki russkoi literatury Sibiri, Vol. 1 (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1982), 114. See also Galya Diment, “Exiled from Siberia: The Construction of Siberian Experience by Early-Nineteenth-Century Irkutsk Writers,” in Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture, ed. Galya Diment and Yuri Slezkine (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 47–65.

21 Iu. V. Got’e, Istoriia oblastnogo upravleniia v Rossii ot Petra I do Ekateriny II (Moscow: G. Lissnera i D. Sobko, 1913), vol. 2; V. Grigor’ev, Reforma mestnogo upravleniia pri Ekaterine (St. Petersburg: Russkaia Skoropechatnaia, 1910); Jones, The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility; de Madariaga, Russia in the Age, 277–91; John LeDonne, Rul-ing Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762–1796 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); V. A. Man’ko, Bliustiteli verkhovnoi vlasti: In-stitut gubernatorstva v Rossii. Istoricheskii ocherk (Moscow: Agraf, 2004).

22 N. Chechulin, Russkoe provintsial’noe obshchestvo vo vtoroi polovine XVIII veka (St. Peterburg: Balasheva, 1889).

23 B. B. Glinskii, “Russkaia periodicheskaia pechat’ v provintsii,” Istoricheskii vestnik, no. 1 (1898): 292–333; N. M. Iadrintsev, Sibir’ kak koloniia (St. Petersburg: Sibiriako-va, 1892), esp. 662–71; V. G. Berezina, Russkaia zhurnalistika pervoi chetverti XIX veka (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1965); A. V. Blium, “Izda-tel’skaia deiatel’nost’ v russkoi provintsii kontsa XVIII–nachala XIX vv.,” Kniga: Issledovaniia i materialy 12 (1966): 136–59.

24 Marker, Publishing, Printing, 144–45; A. A. Sevast’ianova, Russkaia provintsial’naia istoriografiia vtoroi poloviny XVIII veka (Moscow: RAN, 1998).


From Mystical Regionalism to Topographical Realism

In the seventeenth century, mystical regionalism was a cultural trope that imagined certain regions, most significantly the Russian North and Siberia, as a series of sacred sites, marked by the presence of saints’ relics and sacred springs. Regional chronicles articulated mystical regionalism and were re-vitalized in the seventeenth century and developed until the 1830s.25 These chronicles placed a town or region within a sacred chronology, one that often stretched back to Jerusalem. The region saw itself as the center. This is most evident in the work of Semyon Remezov, a cartographer and architect whose work sought to place the Siberian town of Tobol’sk at the center, not only of Russia, but also of the universe. Valerie Kivelson has shown how Remezov’s cartography drew upon many sacred and secular sources in order to claim that Tobol’sk was an especially holy town. However, with the 1775 provincial re-forms of Catherine the Great, the new bureaucracy, centered on the governors, displaced this older vision. As Max Weber noted long ago, bureaucratization is linked to desacralization.26

However, this bureaucratization is not the same as rationalization. As Richard Wortman has noted, the political culture of the Russian monarchy was organized around the principle that the ruler was foreign and that he or she transcended the locale. As a result, power was centered in an individual whose numinous aura erased the specificities of his or her surroundings.27 As we will see later, with the creation of the governors, a similar process took place, as they sought to transcend and transform the province. The Enlightenment, with its interest in universal laws and processes, served this need well.

In contrast, Remezov, working in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century for Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich and Peter the Great, celebrated Tobol’sk as a “God-saved” city.28 Tobol’sk was founded near the former capital of the Khanate of Sibir’, which was under Muslim control until Cossacks conquered it in 1582.29 Making Tobol’sk a holy Christian city thus erased its Muslim past and legitimized Russian rule. Remezov was a member of the middle service class (syn boiarskii), possibly a Cossack. He was born in Tobol’sk in 1642.30 25 Sevast’ianova, Russkaia.26 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (New York:

Bedminster Press, 1968).27 Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2

vol. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995–2000).28 Susan Smith-Peter, “S. U. Remezov i sibirskaia identichnost’ v kontse XVII–

nachale XVIII v.,” Sibirskie istoricheskie issledovaniia 2014, no. 3 (2014): 7–23.29 Terence Armstrong, ed., Yermak’s Campaign in Siberia: A Selection of Documents,

trans. Tatiana Minorsky and David Wileman (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1975).30 L. A. Gol’denburg, Izograf zemli Sibirskoi: Zhizn’ i trudy Semena Remezova (Magadan:

Magadanskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1990), 78–98. On deti boiarskie, see Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago: University of Chicago


Remezov created three atlases of Siberia: the Chorographic Sketchbook of 1697–1711, the Sketchbook of 1699–1701 and the Working Sketchbook of 1702–3. In the last, he included a map of Siberia with Tobol’sk emitting a red halo, a sort of shining city on the steppe.31 Indeed, Remezov explicitly connected Tobol’sk with Jerusalem, writing that, “From the center of the world, from the city of Jerusalem, Tobol’sk is located toward the cold countries, toward the north, in the steppe… it blooms with happiness and beauty.”32 Tellingly, Moscow had no place on this map.

As Kivelson notes, Remezov “effectively created a center in a place more commonly understood as a periphery.”33 Another map placed Tobol’sk at the center of the world, with concentric circles radiating from it in the tradition of maps of Jerusalem. The map’s text “describes the rings of dangerous hordes that encircle the city as well as the natural protections put there to guard it.”34 Tobol’sk is shown as a conclave of many churches; all other settlements are puny in comparison, some only tents, or one church. Moscow is again absent.

Remezov saw Tobol’sk as the heart of Siberia. In a baroque analogy that shows his knowledge of the rhetorical tradition, he compared Siberia to a peaceful angel and identified specific cities as the hands and fingers, with the head being Tobol’sk.35 This is not a separatist vision, but it is one in which Sibe-ria formed its own universe, as Remezov noted in the conclusion to the Working Sketchbook, which he described as an atlas “of the universe [na vselenei] within Siberia; the supreme city of Tobol’sk and cities, settlements, outposts, hamlets, and villages under the jurisdiction of the chancellery.”36 The chancellery here refers to the Siberian Chancellery. “Description of the Siberian Peoples and the Boundaries of their Lands” was “written by order of the Great Sovereign by the Tobol’sk servitor Semen Ul’ianovich Remezov, in the year from Adam 7206, from the birth of Christ 1698, from the taking of Siberia 118.”37 Remezov gave Siberia its own sacred chronology, emphasizing its specially blessed na-ture, even as the rule of the tsar was seen as unquestionably legitimate.

Press, 1971), 28; Christoph Witzenrath, “S. U. Remezov, Cossack Adventurer, and the Opening of Siberia,” in Portraits of Old Russia: Imagined Lives of Ordinary People, 1300–1725, ed. Donald Ostrowski and Marshall Poe (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2011), 209–21.

31 Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom, 133, Plate 18 between pp. 112 and 113. 32 Ibid., 138. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., Plate 23 between pp. 112 and 113. 35 Ibid., 138. For another seventeenth-century description of the riches of Siberia,

see Archpriest Avvakum’s “most extended landscape description, in which he ex-presses his joy at having found a region ‘fashioned by our sweet Christ for man.’” Christopher Ely, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Rus-sia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), 29.

36 Kivelson, Cartographies, 144. Emphasis in original.37 Ibid., 143.


But Catherine the Great sought to control the regions, not celebrate them. For the General Survey of 1765, she ordered topographical descriptions giv-ing the population, towns, trade, products, and other taxable objects in the provinces. These works are key to the development of Enlightenment region-alism. The provinces were to be passive areas acted upon by the state, with-out preexisting historical traditions. The topographical description secularized the province and made it an interchangeable space dotted with various raw materials.

Catherine drew upon the practices of centralizing European states, which had found that the topographical description gave them greater knowledge of their territories. The origins of such descriptions lie in the Renaissance, with the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geographia, which defined chorography as the study of a specific region.38 Topography was confined the study of some sub-section of the region, or, as a seventeenth-century English geographer defined it, “the description of a particular place or places, be they Towns, Cities, Shires, or Counties.”39 Dedicated amateurs usually created topographical maps and descriptions of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century.40 However, by the eighteenth century, European states sponsored such works in order to in-crease their control over their territory.41 James C. Scott noted that maps could remake the land when they had the power of the state behind them.42 How-ever, such maps and descriptions could also make the local visible to itself as well as to the state. The central state’s mapping programs could increase the power of local elites.43

In Russia, the Academy of Sciences oversaw the development of geography in the eighteenth century. Established by Peter the Great in 1724, the Academy attracted European scientists. Historian and geographer Vasilii Tatishchev, in-fluenced by Bernhardus Varenius, defined geography as “the description of a certain region or area,” thus making the study of the region central to the dis-

38 Lucia Nuti, “Mapping Places: Chorography and Vision in the Renaissance,” in Mappings, ed. Denis Cosgrove (London: Reaktion Press, 1999), 90–91.

39 Quoted in Robert Mayhew, Enlightenment Geography: The Political Languages of Brit-ish Geography, 1650–1850 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 27.

40 Michael Charlesworth, “Mapping the Body and Desire: Christopher Packe’s Chorography of Kent,” in Cosgrove, Mappings, 109–24; Mark Brayshay, ed., Topo-graphical Writers in South-West England (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996).

41 Matthew Edney, “Reconsidering Enlightenment Geography and Map Making: Reconnaissance, Mapping, Archive,” in Geography and Enlightenment, ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 191.

42 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condi-tion Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 3.

43 Valerie A. Kivelson, “Cartography, Autocracy, and State Powerlessness: The Uses of Maps in Early Modern Russia,” Imago Mundi 51 (1999): 83.


cipline.44 Academy of Sciences expeditions surveyed and mapped the regions. Topographical descriptions were based on a series of questionnaires devel-oped by the Academy of Sciences.

Maps and topographical depictions provided Russians with new ways to envision the totality of the region and the empire. Influenced by British and Dutch cartography, Russian maps moved from the traditional bird’s eye view to the profile approach, showing a town viewed from a distance on the ground. A profile topographical drawing of Iaroslavl’ from 1731 showed the town with its buildings, piers, and surrounding hamlets in detail, and had a numbered legend at the bottom.45 The topographical description was conceived as an ex-tended annotation to the map. Petr Rychkov, author of an influential descrip-tion of Orenburg, defined the genre as an “explanation of the map.”46

The Academy of Sciences took the lead in disseminating regional knowl-edge as well as creating it. From 1755 to 1764, Academician Gerhard Friedrich Müller edited the Academy’s journal Monthly Compositions for Benefit and En-tertainment (Ezhemesiachnye sochineniia k pol’ze i uveseleniiu sluzhashchie). This journal was the most popular of its era; by 1759, 1250 copies of the journal were printed, more than any other Russian-language periodical until Nikolai Karamzin’s Vestnik Evropy in 1802.47 Monthly Compositions included historical and geographical articles on regions, including Müller’s own works from the Great Northern Expedition, of which he was a part, along with Rychkov’s mod-el topographical description of Orenberg province.48 Müller also published a mix of historical documents, information on Russia’s chronicles, descriptions of the peoples of the empire, translated poetry, prose, essays, and short an-nouncements from European periodicals.49 This was also typical of the first provincial periodicals.

Catherine’s establishment of the General Survey in 1765 and its use of topographical descriptions made the province visible to itself as well as to the center by describing the whole of the newly formed provinces, which gave a sense of unity and coherence to a new space that was often quite different from the previous provincial boundaries. In 1777, the Senate “ordered the governors to cast their replies to its new questionnaire in the form of a topographical de-scription.”50 While many topographical descriptions were unpublished—the Senate in particular considered them the property of the state—the provin-

44 Quoted in Smith-Peter, “How to Write a Region,” 530.45 Ely, This Meager, 99.46 Sevast’ianova, Russkaia, 62.47 J. L. Black, G.-F. Müller and the Imperial Russian Academy (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s

University Press, 1986), 158.48 Ibid., 142–43.49 Ibid., 123–58.50 Robert E. Jones, Provincial Development in Russia: Catherine II and Jakob Sievers (New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 40.


cial periodicals that published them made the descriptions available to a wide public within the province and beyond. In doing so, they disseminated an En-lightenment view of the provinces as empty space waiting for civilization to fill it.

Masons and Maps: The Case of the Solitary Bumpkin

The first provincial journal in Russia was published in Iaroslavl’ from 1786 to 1787 and was titled The Solitary Bumpkin (Uedinennyi poshekhonets). The jour-nal envisioned a sort of Masonic empty space in the provinces that would be filled with people contemplating the emptiness of life by drawing upon the blankness they saw around them. Such solitude would allow them to work on the rough stone that was the self, polishing it to a state of perfection that the distractions of the capitals would have hindered.51 Even though Iaroslavl’ was an exceptionally vibrant provincial cultural space, a reader would not suspect it from the pages of The Solitary Bumpkin.

The journal was part of what I call a provincial scenario of power, build-ing on the work of Richard Wortman.52 The governor of Iaroslavl’, Aleksei Mel’gunov, sought to create an enlightened Iaroslavl’ modeled on St. Peters-burg. One local historian has noted that Mel’gunov wanted to be seen as a “philosopher-king” who combined the ideals of “enlightened monarchy and the Masonic dream of a harmonious society.”53 Like the monarch, the governor erased the specificities of the locale due to his numinous presence. This was the first step in creating a new enlightened Iaroslavl’.

Despite the rhetoric, the city was already an important cultural center. Iaro slavl’ was the site of the first professional theater in Russia, the first pro-vincial journal, the first private provincial printing press, and, later, the first agricultural society in provincial European Russia.54 Iaroslavl’ was exceptional within European Russia for its lively cultural life, which Catherine the Great

51 Douglas Smith, Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth- Century Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999).

52 Wortman, Scenarios.53 E. A. Ermolin, Kul’tura Iaroslavlia: Istoricheskii ocherk (Iaroslavl’: [s.n.], 1998), 31.54 Therese M. Malhame, “Yaroslavl Theater,” in Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and

Soviet History, George N. Rhyne, ed., vol. 55, supplement (Gulf Breeze, FL: Aca-demic International Press, 1993), 129–30; V. P. Semennikov, “Literaturnaia i kni-gopechatnaia deiatel’nost’ v provintsii v kontsa XVIII i v nachale XIX vekov,” Russkii bibliofil, no. 6 (1911): 33; B. V. Tikhonov, “Obzor ‘zapisok’ mestnykh sel’sko-khoziaistvennykh obshchestv 30–50-kh godov XIX v.,” in Problemy istochnikove-deniia 9 (1961): 152–56.


recognized in labeling her first plays “composed in Iaroslavl’.”55 In 1784, soon after Catherine the Great’s 1783 decree allowing private printing presses, three Iaroslavl’ bureaucrats who were Masons established a press in Iaroslavl’.56 Before it published The Solitary Bumpkin, the press released several Masonic works, along with religious writings by Iaroslavl’s bishop and teachers at the local seminary.57

Influenced by the German Enlightenment, mystical and Masonic writings of the time emphasized the necessity of solitude as a means to a more authentic experience of God. The word for bumpkin in Russian is derived from the town Poshekhon’e in Iaroslavl’ Province. The journal is the first attested use of the term as referring to provincials as a type rather than individuals from a specif-ic place.58 The title of the journal itself was a reference to Mel’gunov, who had an estate in Poshekhon’e, to which he would periodically retreat, along with the journal’s editor, Vasilii Sankovskii.59 They were both members of a Ma-sonic lodge in Iaroslavl’ that Mel’gunov had founded. The journal published a topographical description of Iaroslavl’ Province, including the district and town of Poshekhon’e.60 Religious practices of solitary reflection and the writ-ing of topographical descriptions were part of the same cultural continuum, reflecting as they did both the spiritual and practical aspects of the German Enlightenment.

Sankovskii’s position as secretary of the Iaroslavl’ Commission of Public Welfare and his close ties to Mel’gunov provided him with the material and social capital needed to edit the first provincial periodical. In the 1760s, San-

55 Irina Reyfman, “Catherine II as a Patron of Russian Literature,” in Russia En gages the World, ed. Cynthia Whittaker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 58.

56 I. F. Martynov, “Knizhnye sobraniia v Russkoi provintsii kontsa XVIII–nachala XIX v.,” in Knigotorgovoe i bibliotechnoe delo v Rossii v XVII–pervoi polovine XIX v., ed. S. P. Luppov et al. (Leningrad: Biblioteka Akademii Nauk, 1981), 129.

57 V. Semennikov, “Bibliograficheskii spisok knig, napechatannykh v provintsii so vremeni vozniknoveniia grazhdanskikh tipografii po 1807 g.,” Russkii bibliofil, no. 2 (1912): 54–58.

58 L. K. Emel’ianov, Poshekhon’e v russkoi kul’ture: Materialy Balovskikh chtenii 2003 g. ([s.l.]: [s.n.], 2004). I would like to thank Steve Grant for bringing this source to my attention.

59 A. B. Ditmar, Nad starinnymi rukopisiami (“Topograficheskie opisaniia” Iaroslavsko-go kraia kontsa XVIII veka) (Iaroslavl’: Verkhne-Volzhskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1972), 121, n. 34.

60 “Svedeniia o Iaroslavskom namestnichestve,” Uedinennyi poshekhonets: Ezheme-siachnoe sochinenie (February 1786): 122–33. For an analysis of other topographical descriptions in the journal (“On the town of Iaroslavl’,” “On the District of Iaro-slavl’” were two examples), see V. A. Pavlov, Ocherki istorii zhurnalistiki Urala, vol. 1 (Ekaterinburg: Izdatel’stvo Ural’skogo universiteta, 1992), 56. For Mel’gunov’s role in collecting these topographical descriptions, see Sevast’ianova, Russkaia, 60–61.


kovskii had been a member of the Mikhail Kheraskov circle at Moscow Uni-versity and had edited the journal Good Intention (Dobroe namerenie) in 1764.61 While in Iaroslavl’, Sankovskii participated in the writing of several manu-script journals dealing with Masonic themes, including one entitled “On Sol-itude” (Ob uedinenii).62 The subtitle of the journal in 1786 and its sole title in 1787 was Monthly Compositions, echoing the Academy of Sciences’ journal, as The Solitary Bumpkin aspired to the same universal coverage as its namesake.63 The journal also provided a wide variety of material suited to a universal jour-nal, from domestic notes on household items to economic, geographical, liter-ary, and historical articles.64 The Iaroslavl’ Ecclesiastical Seminary provided writers and readers for the journal. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century seminary emphasized the writing of poetry and prose, usually in a Baroque style. This meant that there was a cadre of students with literary training at each seminary.

The factual bent of topographical descriptions suited The Solitary Bumpkin’s anti-pastoral view of local landscape. The introductory article, “Thoughts of a Solitary Bumpkin,” stated that, “The region I inhabit was not made by nature for pleasant views of its surrounding objects such as inspiring pastures, ponds, fertile valleys, amusing shrubberies, various views of luxury and everything, about which the poetic imagination dreams, is foreign to this region.”65 How-ever, this meager nature provided the raw material for useful reflections: “Yet from these surroundings and the very wilds the strength of a thinking person opens a treasure higher than all such images, for the truth is the highest guide and is an internal luminary that is always with us.”66 Here the idea of the sol-itary thinker withdrawing from the world justifies the lack of external beauty by a call for a search for the internal truth, which for many Masons was more likely to be found in solitude than in the busy world.

However, the world was not completely barren; in fact, Iaroslavl’, like the rest of Catherine the Great’s realm, was flourishing: “The famous Iaroslavl’ 61 Walter J. Gleason, Moral Idealists, Bureaucracy, and Catherine the Great (New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 62–65. For the Masonic content of the Kheraskov’s works, see Stephen Lessing Baehr, The Paradise Myth in Eigh-teenth-Century Russia: Utopian Patterns in Early Secular Russian Literature and Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 99–111.

62 A. A. Sevast’ianova, “’Pishi! Mne muzy vse rekli edinoglasno…’ (Iz istorii by-tovaniia rukopisnykh sbornikov v okruzhenii Iaroslavskogo namestnika A. P. Mel’gunova v kontse XVIII veka),” Iaroslavskaia starina, no. 1 (1994): 4.

63 Between 1757 and 1760, the Academy of Sciences’ Monthly Compositions published several Masonic works praising solitude. See Thomas Newlin, The Voice in the Gar-den: Andrei Bolotov and the Anxieties of Russian Pastoral, 1738–1833 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 54–55.

64 Pavlov, Ocherki , 58–59.65 “Razmyshlenie Uiedinnogo Poshekhontsa,” Ueidinennyi Poshekhonets (January

1786), 3. See also Ely, This Meager Nature.66 “Razmyshlenie,” 3–4.


already has located within itself not only a significant number of homes erect-ed by private persons, but the useful institutions of a school and a printing press, which with its … freshly-minted letters publishes the short and philan-thropic orders of the monarch, preserving for the ages the wise path of the Russian Minerva toward the perfection of the happiness of the people.”67 These contrasting descriptions are in line with an Enlightenment regionalism that sought to erase the preexisting specificities of space in order to establish a new enlightened place. The article, which was likely written by the editor, San-kovskii, could also be seen as speaking for Mel’gunov, as the solitary bumpkin of the journal’s title. It can be read as a celebration of the governor’s ability to melt down and recast his surroundings, just as the printing press had done by transmitting the word of the empress. Enlightenment regionalism sought to erase and remake the regions in the image of power.

The Solitary Bumpkin included a topographical description detailing the area, rivers, population, main towns, and trades of Iaroslavl’ province and several of its district capitals. The focus was on describing, classifying, and thus legitimizing the territorial divisions of the province, which Catherine had recently reshaped. The economic information was to testify to the flourishing condition of the provinces under the rule of Mel’gunov, who oversaw the dis-tribution and collection of the 1778 Academy of Sciences questionnaire, which had 35 sections. By 1784, the responses had arrived and been worked into two full-fledged topographical descriptions by members of the governor’s staff. It was from these that the published topographical description in The Solitary Bumpkin was formed.68 This publication asserted the governor’s control over the territory and also his belief in a harmonious society in which such descrip-tions were not simply the government’s but should be shared with the public.

In The Solitary Bumpkin, Enlightenment regionalism overlapped with Ma-sonic ideas to create a space in which emptiness and solitude would create a space for Masons to polish their inner self and catalog the provinces. Despite its vibrant cultural activity, Iaroslavl’ figures in the journal as a space without place, rather like the town of N. in Gogol’s Dead Souls. The journal ceased pub-lication in 1786; it seems that it did not reach out beyond the circles of Masons and the enlightened clergy in Iaroslavl’.69

Siberian Journals and Siberian Identity

Three journals were published in Tobol’sk in the eighteenth century. Two of them saw Siberia as an empty space to be filled with education and Russian settlement. The third ignored Siberia. Siberia was nothing more than a blank slate. Its vast size meant vast opportunities in the field of education, but little 67 Ibid., 5.68 Sevast’ianova, Russkaia, 60; Ditmar, Nad starinnymi, 100, 104. 69 Marker, Publishing, 144.


else about it was worth noting, particularly in a cultural sense. This erased the long preexisting sense of Siberian identity mentioned earlier.70

These Siberian periodicals came out of Tobol’sk, the capital of the epony-mous province in Western Siberia and the object of Remezov’s lifelong work, as discussed earlier. In the late sixteenth century, the Tobol’sk Archbishop’s Residence began producing manuscripts on the history of Siberia and other topics; by the 1730s, the residence was the center of literary culture in Western Siberia.71 Merchants also compiled manuscripts from various sources, start-ing in the sixteenth century and continuing through the 1790s. The regionalist A.P. Shchapov described a late-eighteenth-century compilation that included translations of Voltaire, Homer, Rousseau, Copernicus, Vasilii the Great, Zosi-ma, and Savvatii Solovetskii.72 Other compilations included many newspaper articles on European, Asian, and Siberian news.73

In contrast to The Solitary Bumpkin, the Siberian eighteenth-century publi-cations reached a wider audience. In a way, this is not surprising, given that the former was speaking for Iaroslavl’, one of the main centers of provincial culture in the heartland, but still, after all, a relatively small area with an even smaller educated elite. In contrast, the Siberian periodicals dealt with the much larger area of Siberia, which had a long preexisting tradition of geographical description engaged in by a wider range of society. As Gary Marker wrote, “the Tobolsk magazines succeeded in creating a dialogue between center and periphery and in communicating with a national audience.”74

In Tobol’sk, the first journal imported Enlightenment ideas into Siberia but was not interested in describing Siberia itself. This journal, entitled Irtysh Become the Hippocrene (Irtysh prevrashchaiushchiisia v Ipokrenu) and published between 1789 and 1791, was edited by the exile Pankratii Sumarokov, the nephew of the playwright Aleksandr Sumarokov. It drew upon the students and teachers of the Main Public School in Tobol’sk (Tobol’skoe glavnoe narodnoe uchilishe) as writers and subscribers.75 Itself established in 1788–89, the Main Public School was staffed mainly by seminarians and had the aim of preparing teachers for the small public schools at the district (uezd) level.76 Thus, the jour-nal can be seen as a collaborative, serial textbook. The journal included original works and translations by Sumarokov’s wife, Sofiia Andreevna (nee Kazab), who had translated and published Jean Jacques Rosseau’s Emile in Tobol’sk,

70 Kivelson, Cartographies.71 Okladnikov, Ocherki, 30, 58.72 Ibid.,113.73 Ibid.74 Marker, Publishing, 144..75 L. S. Liubimov, Istoriia sibirskoi pechati (Irkutsk: Izdatel’stvo Irkutskogo universi-

teta, 1982), 4. 76 A. N. Kopylov, Ocherki kul’turnoi zhizni Sibiri XVII–nachala XIX v. (Novosibirsk:

Nauka, 1974), 58.


and his sister, N.P. Sumarokova.77 Exiled to Tobol’sk for counterfeiting, Suma-rokov collaborated with the Main Public School’s teachers to write prose and poetry and translate moral and philosophical works.78 The Tobol’sk Commis-sion of Public Welfare also supported the journal financially. Like The Solitary Bumpkin, Irtysh’s subtitle was Monthly Compositions, suggesting the continuing influence of the Academy of Sciences’ journal. Catherine’s educational reforms as well as the 1775 provincial reforms together provided the necessary institu-tional support for such publications.

The French Enlightenment, and particularly its search for laws for both natural and social phenomena, influenced the journal. Learning about such universal laws would help with the enlightening of Siberia. Pankratii Suma-rokov translated selections of Voltaire’s Foundations of Newton’s Philosophy for the first issue in September 1789.79 The June 1790 volume spoke of the nat-ural rights of humanity; elsewhere, several articles were strongly influenced by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.80 Alexander Radishchev, the author of the important anti-serfdom work A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, was exiled to Tobol’sk in 1790 and soon after his arrival I. I. Bakhtin, the Tobol’sk public prosecutor, published a poem in the journal comparing landlords’ treatment of their serfs to their use of livestock.81

At the same time, to focus solely on the more radical aspects of the journal would be to distort its general tone, which was modeled on the collections of French anecdotes from which much of the content was taken. These were not always political but instead sought to provide a “dictionary of conversation” so that their readers could take part in civilized conversation on many topics.82 In addition, the journal was not anti-government. Instead, it identified both enlightened absolutism and the French Enlightenment as ways to disseminate education throughout humanity. In 1790, the journal translated the Marquis de Condorcet’s speech to the Paris Royal Academy of Sciences praising Peter the Great as an example of the enlightened ruler aiding the spread of knowl-edge and general progress.83 Interestingly, the translator of this work took is-sue with Condorcet’s statement that all people were one family, which was a typical expression of Enlightenment universalism. Instead, the translator V.

77 Ibid., 116; For the Rousseau translation, see V. G. Utkov, “Sibirskie pervopechatniki Vasilii i Dmitrii Kornil’evy,” Kniga: Issledovaniia i materialy 38 (1979): 87.

78 Pavlov, Ocherki, 69.79 V. D. Rak, “Perevody v pervom Sibirskom zhurnale,” in Ocherki literatury i kritiki

Sibiri (XVII–XX vv.), ed. Iu. S. Postnov et al. (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1976), 58.80 Pavlov, Ocherki, 95, 105.81 Okladnikov, Ocherki, 117.82 Honoré Lacombe de Prézel, Dictionnaire d’anecdotes, de traits singulieres, et caracter-

istiques, historiettes, bons mots, naivetés, saillies, reparties ingénieuses, etc., etc. (Paris: La Combe, 1770), first unnumbered page.

83 Rak, “Perevody,” 41–42, 61.


Prutkovskii argued that it was not necessary that all people be part of one family with equal rights; instead, “it would be sufficient if they join into sepa-rate societies (obshchestva) … which would have friendly relations among each other.”84 This is particularly important, as it critiques the universality of the Enlightenment and begins to suggest the value of particularity.

An ode “To the Irtysh Become the Hippocrene” published in 1790 shows how the Siberian landscape was reimagined with classical ideas superimposed onto its natural features. The Hippocrene was the classical source of inspira-tion, while the Irtysh was the river running through Tobol’sk. As a poem stat-ed, speaking to Siberia itself:

Has it been long since in Tobol’skA Parnassus was planted and made visible?Already it has infused in you a feeling For the holy light of science.It has named the Irtysh the Hippocrene:Are these changes enoughSo you can see the golden age in yourself?In comparison to your most ancient years,When not a shaft of light was visible, Already it is not Siberia we see in you,

But a garden of the sciencesDedicated to the residence of the Helicon sisters.85

This poem expresses the core of Enlightenment regionalism: the existing place was erased or seen to be empty or dark. This allowed for the creation of an entirely new landscape. In this case, it was the landscape of classical in-spiration. Mount Helicon was said to be the abode of the nine muses, and the Hippocrene was a sacred spring on that mount that gave poetic inspiration. Parnassus was another sacred mountain and source of inspiration. The Main Public School, reimagined as a sacred mountain, was now in the position of instructing and transforming Siberia herself. From being its own universe un-der Remezov, Siberia was reimagined as a classical space in which being “not Siberia” was the only thing that would raise it to the attention of the world. Like Iaroslavl’, Siberia had to be erased before it could be remade.

This journal sought to serve society as a whole. A letter to the editor ex-plained the civic and political importance of the Main Public School as a way to spread knowledge more effectively: “Human life is short, and the subjects of science are broad, and civil affairs suffer from a shortage of people, and from this comes the political necessity for youths, who are forced to shorten as

84 Quoted in Rak, “Perevody,” 57. 85 Ivan Trunin, “Oda Irtyshu, prevrashchaiushchemusia v Ippokrenu,” Irtysh, Janu-

ary 1790.


much as possible their continuing studies, and find a job. These circumstanc-es sometimes extinguish that flame of reason in these young people, which might have allowed them to express their superlative talents in science to their full brilliance before society.”86 The old-fashioned type of education, usually by foreign tutors with little real knowledge, “did not contribute to the public good.”87 The journal, like the school itself, would contribute to the public good and to society, to which Siberia only had importance because it was part of the whole.

The Enlightenment knowledge that the students would receive, both at the school and through the journal, would serve all of Russia, not just Siberia. The stated aim of Irtysh was “to provide teachers with an exercise worthy of their calling, by which they may further develop their talents while they fulfill their honorable duties.”88 The journal published the speech of I. Lafinov at the opening of the Main Public School, in which he emphasized the need for science and knowledge to drive out superstition and ignorance. A student at the school “will never be a superstitious judge of many phenomena… He will know the exact purpose of various useful resources from the abundance of nature. It will be known to merchants where to send profitably the products of our fatherland.” In turn, he stated, this would “raise not only each individual personally, but also entire states and regions.”89 In the larger picture, the teach-ers at the school “will find the knowledge absolutely necessary for society that forms the lasting well being of a man, and will make him a useful citizen, a worthy son of the fatherland.”90

Tobol’sk merchant Vasilii Kornil’ev published Irtysh. Kornil’ev opened a private press in Tobol’sk in 1789 and also owned a paper factory and sold pa-per, books, and forms. This press showed a distinct interest in Siberia, publish-ing Tobol’sk Chronicle, and Short Information on Governors Formerly in Tobol’sk and in All Siberian Towns and Fortresses, among others.91 Dmitrii Vasil’evich Kor-nil’ev (grandfather and namesake of the great chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev), worked with his father at the press and he also published The Historical Journal, which will be discussed below. In a letter dated 3 May 1839, his son, Vasilii Dmitrievich Kornil’ev, noted that his family owned the first factories in To-bol’sk for making paper and crystal and further stated, “The printing press was established by them in 1787 at the same time as Franklin in America. The newspaper Irtysh began to be published in 1789 … And the privileges he re-86 “Pis’mo k izdateliam,” Irtysh, May 1790.87 Ibid.88 Quoted in Okladnikov, Ocherki, 115.89 Rak, “Perevody,” 33.90 Ibid.91 T. V. Koptseva, “O gramotnosti i kruge chteniia Sibirskikh kuptsov (vtoraia

polovina XVIII–pervaia polovina XIX v.),” Predprinimateli i predprinimatel’stvo v Sibiri 2001, no. 3 (2001): 205, available at http://new.hist.asu.ru/biblio/predpri3/15.html, accessed 25 August 2013.


ceived allowed him to buy 200 serfs.”92 Kornil’ev connected the work of the Tobol’sk press to the press of Benjamin Franklin, even though the latter had sold his printing business already by 1748. In 1787, Franklin was elected presi-dent of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.93 The Kornil’ev press did share an Enlightenment outlook with Franklin on many things, although their views on forced labor differed, as Kornil’ev invested his money in serfs.

The Tobol’sk journals show the key role of the Commissions of Public Wel-fare and the governor in encouraging provincial culture, sometimes by admin-istrative means. They are thus part of the bureaucratization of the region. All the Tobol’sk journals had more subscribers (from between 100 to 186 subscrib-ers) and were more economically viable than The Solitary Bumpkin.94 Irtysh was published in a print run of 300.95 In 1790 there were 186 subscribers to Irtysh, among them 151 bureaucrats and 20 merchants.96 The Commission of Public Welfare dealt with the sale of Kornil’ev books and journals, paying the press ahead of time and distributing them around the province to police officers, as well as one copy to each government office. Those interested in buying copies could do so from the commission or local government offices.97 In 1789, Vasilii Kornil’ev asked that the Commission transfer its regular payment of 50 rubles a month in support of the press from himself to his son Dmitrii.98 This shows both that the press depended on the Commission for financial support and that Dmitrii was taking primary responsibility for its content by 1789. As in Iaroslavl’, the Tobol’sk governor, Aleksandr Aliab’ev supported and protected the journal, even to the point of requiring his subordinates to subscribe.99 This later led to problems, as the journal was not always able to prevail upon their subscribers to send in the money they owed the journals. Several court cases ensued, one of which lasted until 1811.100

92 N. Ia. Kapustina-Gubkina, Semeinaia khronika v pis’makh materi, ottsa, brata, sestry, diadi D. I. Mendeleeva (St. Petersburg: Russkoe fiziko-khimicheskoe obshchestvo, 1908), 135.

93 “The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin,” http://learn.fi.edu/franklin/timeline/, ac-cessed 26 January 2014.

94 Marker, Publishing, 144.95 Koptseva, “O gramotnosti,” 205. 96 L. S. Liubimov, Istoriia sibirskoi pechati XVIII–nachala XX vv.: Khrestomatiia (Irkutsk:

Irkutskii gosudarstvenyi universitet, 2004), parts 1–2: 26.97 Utkov, “Sibirskie pervopechatniki,” 78, 87. 98 M. M. Gromyko, “Sibirskie kuptsy Kornil’evy,” Izvestiia Sibirskogo otdeleniia Aka-

demii Nauk SSSR: Seriia Obshchestvennykh nauk 1972, no. 6, pt. 2 (1972): 24–25.99 Okladnikov, Ocherki, 124. 100 M. A. Alpatov, “Sibirskii zhurnal—sovremennik frantsuzskoi burzhuaznoi

revoliutsii kontsa XVIII veka,” Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik: Stat’i i materialy po istorii Frantsii 1961 (1962): 114.


The Historical Journal, being a collection from different books of curious news, amusing stories, and anecdotes (Istoricheskii zhurnal ili sobranie iz raznykh knig li-ubopytnykh izvestii, uveselitel’nykh povestei, i anekdotov), published in Tobol’sk in 1790 was interested in defining Siberia’s characteristics and outlining what was unique about Siberia. Dmitrii Vasil’evich Kornil’ev was the editor and publisher of the Historical Journal. This was the first provincial journal with the stated goal of describing the region in which it was located. But this was not so much a celebration of Siberia’s past as a rewriting in order to create a Rus-sian future. Kornil’ev erased the political history of Siberian tribes in order to envision Siberia an empty space ready for Russian conquest. Like other uses of Enlightenment regionalism, space was emptied so it could be filled with new meaning.

Kornil’ev’s interest, although grounded in Siberia, ranged widely, and his field of vision included China, with which his family had trading connections, as well as Asia in general. He dedicated the program of the journal to Gov-ernor Aliab’ev, who had commissioned topographical descriptions of Siberia in 1789–90. Kornil’ev wrote, “Having free time, not being occupied with any-thing, aside from commerce, I consider it my duty to select from various his-torical and geographical books information worthy of interest, such as: about Siberia, Kamchatka, America, Asian people; about the growth of astounding trees in China; about different species of animals, birds, and fish; about the most famous towns, islands, shores and their commerce, along with attached amusing stories and anecdotes.”101

Kornil’ev took nearly all the articles about Siberia in the Historical Journal from Johann Eberhard Fischer’s Siberian History from the Very Discovery of Si-beria to the Conquest of This Land by Russian Arms (Sibirskaia istoriia s samogo ot-krytiia Sibiri do zavoevaniia sei zemli rossiiskim oruzhiem) (St. Petersburg, 1774).102 Fischer was sent to Siberia in 1739 to carry on the work of Gerhard Friedrich Müller and spent more than nine years there, conducting an extensive survey of Siberian history, geography, and culture. In 1768, at the Academy of Scienc-es, he published his major work, Siberian History (Sibirische Geschichte von der Entdekkung Sibiriens bis auf die Eroberung dieses Lands durch die russische Waffen), which was mainly drawn on Müller’s work. In 1774 it was translated into Rus-sian.103 Fischer was part of a whole group of scholars, mainly Germans, who studied the peoples and places of the Russian Empire. Yuri Slezkine has noted that these scholars sought to derive from the seemingly infinite specificities of the people studied some universal key that would explain human behavior. At first, the focus was on defining people by religion, then by language. During

101 Istoricheskii zhurnal, ili sobraniie iz raznykh knig liubopytnykh izvestii, uveselitel’nykh povestei, i anekdotov (1790): ii.

102 For a full listing of the sources used in the journal, see V. D. Rak, “Bibliografich-eskiie zametki,” XVII vek 19 (1995): 205–7.

103 “Fisher, Iogann Ebergard,” available at http://www.vehi.net/brokgauz/, accessed 27 August 2013.


this time, Russians were studied ethnographically in a manner very like the study of Siberian peoples.

With the rise of the idea of defining people by their membership in a na-tion, the treatment of the Russian people required scholars to “overcome eth-nography by history.”104 This meant defining the Russians as agents of history, not as objects of ethnography. What is particularly interesting about Dmitrii Kornil’ev’s use of Fischer’s work is that it shows the opposite process at work in the treatment of Siberian peoples. Kornil’ev sought to overcome history with ethnography. That is, he left out all of Fischer’s discussions of the political activities of Siberian peoples and instead left only ethnographic descriptions. The peoples of Siberia were left with a way of life (byt), but not with a political past. In particular, the activities of Siberian peoples under the last khan of Si-bir, Kuchum, are left out of Kornil’ev’s account. Fischer wrote that: “I now will discuss those Siberian peoples, which the Russians first became aware of, the residents of Sibir’ in the narrow sense. I am thinking of the Samoeds, Voguls, Ostiaks, and Tatars, of which the last three were subjects of Kuchum, Khan of Sibir.”105

The Historical Journal cut out this introduction and began only with the typical ethnographic description of the name of the people and the territory in which they lived.106 Similarly, Fischer discussed how the Siberian peoples must have expected to be forced to convert to Islam once Kuchum did so, as “otherwise they would have acted against the common sense of politics.”107 This section was left out of the Historical Journal, although the next section, on Kuchum’s campaign to end paganism, was not. After Fischer’s statement that Kuchum was unable to force everyone to give up paganism, Kornil’ev wrote, “and some people still are.”108 The ethnographic was acceptable, the politi-cal not. It is also telling that Kornil’ev changed Fischer’s statement that “the Tungus are hale and hearty, cheerful people with a natural good sense” to the slightly less threatening “the Tungus are good-natured, cheerful people with a natural good sense.”109

104 Yuri Slezkine, “Naturalists Versus Nations: Eighteenth-Century Russian Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity,” Representations 47 (1994): 189. On Fischer’s importance for the growth of racial thinking, see Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univeristy Press, 2011), 74.

105 I. E. Fischer, Sibirskaia istoriia s samogo otkrytiia Sibiri do zavoevaniia sei zemli rossii-skim oruzhiem (St. Peterburg: Pri Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1774), 72, avail-able at http://frontiers.loc.gov/, accessed 25 August 2013.

106 “O samoiadi,” Istoricheskii zhurnal, ili sobranie iz raznykh knig liubopytnykh izvestii, uveselitel’nykh povestei, i anekdotov (1790): 31.

107 Fischer, Sibirskaia istoriia, 96–97.108 “Izvestie o starinnykh tatarskikh kniaz’iakh v Sibiri i ob vvedenii Kuchumom v

Sibiri Makhometanskoi very,” Istoricheskii zhurnal, 78.109 Fischer, Sibirskaia istoriia, 68; “O Iakutakh, i Tungusakh,” Istoricheskii zhurnal, 25.


Other changes and omissions seem to suggest that Kornil’ev had a strong sense of regional identity and did not want Siberia to appear in a bad light. The most striking of these can be seen in his edition of Fischer’s comment on Sibe-ria’s climate. The first part of the sentence is found in both sources: “Siberia, although a cold country, has clean and healthy air.”110 However, Kornil’ev left out the rest of the sentence, which stated, “and people might live to a great old age, if they did not shorten their life by their extreme drunkenness.”111 In an-other case, Kornil’ev left out a description that seemed to raise questions about the conquest of Siberia. Fischer had written, “In this way Ermak from a robber became the head of state of three peoples.”112

The next journal published in Tobol’sk was The Scholarly, Economic, Moral, Historical, and Amusing Library for the Use and Pleasure of Readers of All Ranks (Bib-lioteka uchenaia, ekonomicheskaia, istoricheskaia, i uveselitel’naia v pol’zu i udovol’-stvie vsiakogo zvaniia chitatelei). Published in 1793 and 1794 by Dmitrii Kornil’ev, it was edited by Pankratii Sumarokov, who had been the editor of Irtysh. The journal consisted of the five sections reflected in its title, which again echoed Monthly Compositions. As in Irtysh, the French and British Enlightenment were important influences and Siberian topics were not to be found. The Library sought to create an enlightened Russia, including an Enlightened Siberia, by exposing its subscribers to a wide range of European works. One of the li-brary’s interesting aims was to reach all ranks of society. This aim was noted in the journal’s title and in the advertisements placed in the Moscow and St. Petersburg newspapers. The call for subscriptions promised a two-year run of six volumes a year with material taken from “nearly 500 of the newest and most useful books,” and would be filled with information “which is needed by everyone, whatever their title or rank.”113 Although Sumarokov had promised to use 500 books, scholarship suggests that he had around one tenth of that, mainly compilations.114 However, these books included the Encyclopedie, and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Spectator.115 Sumarokov sought to reach all possible readers, from scholars to those mainly interested in practical information. Thus, in the “economic” sections of the journal, it offered advice

110 Fischer, Sibirskaia istoriia, 4; “O kachestve Sibiri,” Istoricheskii zhurnal, 4.111 Fisicher, Sibirskaia istoriia, 4.112 Ibid., 132.113 Quoted in Pavlov, Ocherki, 123.114 V. D. Rak, Russkie literaturnye sborniki i periodicheskie izdaniia: Vtoroi poloviny XVIII

veka (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1998), 252.115 See Okladnikov, Ocherki, 130; Iu. D. Levin, “Angliiskaia prosvetitel’skaia zhurnal-

istika v russkoi literature XVIII veka,” in Epokha Prosveshcheniia: Iz istorii mezhdu-narodnykh sviazei russkoi literatury, ed. M. P. Alekseev (Leningrad: Nauka, 1967), 75–79, 96–98.


on how to make green paint, how to kill ants, and how to make simple Russian tobacco taste like the best French snuff, among other similar topics.116

One of the main areas of interest of the journal was the East and Islam. While Islam in France provided a means by which to identify a self against a distant Other, in Tobol’sk, the view was quite different. The town was the successor to a Muslim capital and Siberian Tatars lived there still. All of Siberia took its name from the Khanate of Sibir’. Thus, the spread of Enlightenment ideas regarding Islam, which rejected the religion, was a continuation of the erasure of Islamic history by Remezov and Kornil’ev. For example, the journal translated the entry on the Qu’ran from the Encyclopédie. Aside from leaving out some of the more technical linguistic discussion and all cross references, the translation faithfully conveyed the original, which reads as a summation of many of the anti-Muslim tropes still met with today, including that Islam was spread by the sword.117 The East also made appearances in the “amusing” section of the journal in the form of Oriental tales translated from the French, including tales by Montesquieu, as well as in the “historical” section, which was filled with biographies of Muslims translated from the French that rarely failed to mention the size of their harems and other Orientalist details.118

Protected by Governor Aliab’ev and financially supported by the Commis-sion of Public Welfare, Sumarokov hoped to attract an audience throughout the Russian Empire. Subscribers were found from 50 populated points from Ukraine to the capitals to Siberia. One of the most striking things about the Library was that it had a very large percentage of provincial subscribers. Of a total of 115 subscribers to the Library, 104, or 90.4%, were from the provinces, while only six (for 5.2%) were from St. Petersburg and five (or 4.4%) were from Moscow. This was the largest known percentage of provincial subscribers for any journal. The next highest was Morning Hours, which had 69 provincial subscribers out of 105, for a percentage of 65.7%.119 The Biblioteka advertised in the St. Petersburg Newspaper (Sankt-Peterburgskii vedomosti) as a publication of the Tobol’sk Commission of Public Welfare, and it is possible that provincial subscribers received the journal through the network of commissions.120 This is reinforced by the fact that 95 of the subscribers were bureaucrats.121 Its 115

116 Biblioteka uchenaia, ekonomicheskaia, istoricheskaia, i uveselitel’naia v pol’zu i udovol’st-vie vsiakogo zvaniia chitatelei (1793), no. 1: 94 and no. 2: 247.

117 Biblioteka uchenaia, no. 2 (1793): 129–39; “Qur’an,” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, translated by Susan Emanuel (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2005), http://hdl.han-dle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.440, accessed 17 December 2014. Trans. of “Alcoran ou Al-Coran,” Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 1. (Paris, 1751).

118 Biblioteka uchenaia, no. 2 (1793): 142–57; Rak, Russkie literaturnye, 249, 257. 119 Samarin, Chitatel’, 196. 120 Liubimov, Istoriia sibirskoi: Khrestomatiia, 17–18.121 Ibid., 26.


subscribers comprised a respectable amount, surpassing several periodicals published in the capitals. Thus, to a large extent, Sumarokov did reach the non-elite reader he sought.

Sumarokov undertook the translations along with his wife, Sofiia.122 In ad-dition, Sumarokov wrote a multipart article on the success of the arts in Russia. Defining the arts as the whole of human endeavor, Sumarokov highly praised his uncle, A. P. Sumarokov, comparing him to Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire in France, Shakespeare in England, and Lessing in Germany.123 Sumarokov also defended the quality of Russian manufactured goods, arguing that the prejudice against them was unfounded. With its household hints, moral sto-ries, historic essays and amusing anecdotes, the Library was clearly intended as a universal journal. After Sumarokov completed the two-year run promised, the journal ceased publication, and there were no periodicals in Siberia for nearly forty years.

While Irtysh had claimed to speak to Siberia in order to enlighten it, the Library went even further by aiming at a universal audience and publishing only topics of universal interest to the educated public. Although the journal was from Siberia, little would have reminded the reader of that fact. This fits with the devaluing of the region found in Enlightenment regionalism. At the same time, its use of the Enlightenment’s critique of Islam is part of a longer tradition of erasing Siberia’s Muslim past.

To conclude, this article has set out to show how the idea of Enlightenment regionalism arose and was received in the provinces. Enlightenment regional-ism denied the specificity or authenticity of space outside the capitals. These ideas were adapted in four eighteenth-century journals printed in the prov-inces, each of which imposed a different sort of universality on their locale. Originally formed by the genre of topographical descriptions, Enlightenment regionalism saw non-central space as a source of raw materials, not of mean-ing; it made empty provinces by erasing specificity and inserting universality.

Department of HistoryCollege of Staten Island/CUNY

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122 Samarin, Chitatel’, 196.123 Quoted in Pavlov, Ocherki, 133.

Making Empty Provinces: Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment Regionalism in Russian Provincial Journals

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