Contested Russian Tourism: Cosmopolitanism, Nation, and Empire in the Nineteenth Century

This literary, cultural history examines imperial Russian tourism’s entanglement in the vexed issue of cosmopolitanism understood as receptiveness to the foreign and pitted against provinciality and nationalist anxiety about the allure and the influence of Western Europe. The study maps the shift from Enlightenment cosmopolitanism to Byronic cosmopolitanism with special attention to the art pilgrimage abroad. For typically middle-class Russians daunted by the cultural riches of the West, va...