Fantastic Empires: Imaginary Travel in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Russia

• Main Author: Bruce, Stephen Andrew
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2024
• Subjects: Russian literature; Travel in literature; Future; The; in literature; Eighteenth century; Nineteenth century; Territorial expansion; Moon; Science fiction; Shcherbatov; M. M. (Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich); kni︠a︡zʹ; 1733-1790; Levshin; Vasiliĭ; 1746-1826; Ki︠u︡khelʹbeker; V. K. (Vilʹgelʹm Karlovich); 1797-1846; Senkovskīĭ; Osip Ivanovich; 1800-1858; Bulgarin; Faddeĭ; 1789-1859; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.7916/43n5-7e66

This dissertation examines Russian fantastical travel narratives from 1784 to 1855, an era of substantial imperial conquest, in which authors of various backgrounds, both Russian and non-Russian, wrestled with questions of cultural identity and the prospects for Russia’s development on the global scale, while in a profound but often contentious relationship with the countries of Western Europe. My chapters cover three different categories of fantastic travel. The first includes journeys to undiscovered space, including Antarctica and the Moon (in works by Shcherbatov, Lyovshin, Kiukhelbeker, and Senkovsky), which largely criticize Russian expansionism. The second is stories of travel to or in the distant future (Vilgelm Kiukhelbeker, Faddei Bulgarin, and Vladimir Odoevsky), which project a more positive view of Russian imperial destiny. The third category is metafictional travel, through maps and the written page (Veltman), which deconstructs the very notion of imperial reality. I argue that writers employed the genre of fantastic travel literature, as well as specific devices such as dreams and frame narratives, to critically interrogate and reshape the imperial and national ideologies of their time. These works anticipate modern science fiction by using a wide range of spatial and temporal settings to create new worlds that highlight the possibilities or faults of their own societies, for satirical or didactic purposes—and as such they benefit from the application of recent theories of science fiction. Given the diverse range of authors and time periods I investigate, my work also has a taxonomic purpose, delineating the thematic evolution of fantastic travel narratives in different categories and paving the way for more targeted analyses of these understudied works.