World Literature and Russia

Russian literature challenges both Paris-centered accounts of "world literature" like Pascale Casanova's and what Arjun Appadurai terms "Eurochronology." It often does so by interrogating Russia's supposed provinciality (provintsial "nost") - a word that carries especially complicated resonances in Russian. Russia's unique situation - peripheral but not small, European but also Asian, Christian but perhaps not exactly "Christendom" - helps explain the importance of the provintsiia trope, in which Russia's provincial places are characterized by an ambiguous, mixed-up temporality that reveals Russia itself to be neither "modern" nor straightforwardly "backward." When writers like Gogol represent provintsiia as a mishmash of objects, styles, words, and times, they suggest that Russia may exist permanently outside of normative (European) chronology. By drawing a connection between chaotic simultaneity and creative potential, they contradict Casanova, who (drawing on Wallerstein) represents peripheries as fundamentally sterile and dependent. Thus Russia's insistence on its own provinciality helps illuminate how its tradition resists assimilation into "world literature."