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E-book Haunted Empire : Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny
One such concern is the lack of clear differentiation between the Russian imperial and national identities, a phenomenon that is typical of contiguous empires in general, but that seems to be particularly prominent in the Russian case.36 Some scholars suggest that for various reasons—mainly related to its status as a land empire—Russia failed to create a nation altogether, and its intellectual and political elite were imperialist rather than nationalist. 37 Conversely, Mark Bassin argues for the fusion of imperialism and nationalism in Russia, where the national sentiment did not preclude a full endorsement of Russia’s political and territorial expansion into non-Russian areas; rather, it was seen as “as an important part of [the nationalists’] program of national advancement and renewal.” 38 Olga Maiorova, while contesting the assumption that Russian national identity was overshadowed or even subsumed by that of the empire, admits the overlap between the two, a “peculiar blend of national sentiment and imperial pride,” characteristic of nineteenth-century Russian nationalist discourse. 39 It is this overlap that is relevant for my purpose; rather than taking sides in this debate I focus on the disorienting effect of this fluid sense of Russianness. As Bassin puts it, as a result of this symbiosis between the nationalist and imperial projects and the unclear nature of Russia’s geographical contours, “the question ‘where is Russia?’ . . . was neither elementary nor self-evident, but instead one which had no commonly accepted answer.” 40 In his Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900, Franco Moretti observes that in Jane Austen’s novels, the marriage market connecting differing counties in a particular part of England could work only if “women feel ‘at home,’ ” “can feel nation-state as a true homeland.”41 In the Russian case, this sense of the nation-state within the empire was muddled at best, and the literary characters I examine do not quite feel at home in the Russian imperial peripheries or even in its problematic center, St. Petersburg.
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