No book is produced by the author alone. I am indebted to everyone who supported this project or shared their time, energy, and ideas. Sam Hodgkin more than anyone else enabled this project to materialize and shared the burdens that it entailed over many years. My sincere thanks also go to my colleagues in the Russian and Eurasian Studies Program at Colgate University: Sergei Domashenko, Jessica Graybill, Carolyn Guile, Ian Helfant, Alexander Nakhimovsky, Alice Nakhimovsky, Nancy Ries, and Kira Stevens. I am especially grateful to Alice Nakhimovsky for staying on message about what it takes to finish a book.
Language is the foundation of this project, and I thank those who taught me Russian language and literature at Hampshire College and Amherst College, especially Joanna Hubbs, Stanley Rabinowitz, Viktoria Schweitzer, Catherine Ciepiela, Tatyana Babyonysheva, and Jane Taubman. In the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, Lisa Little and Anna Muza supported my development as a teacher and ongoing student of Russian. It was a privilege to have such readers as Irina Paperno, Olga Matich, Eric Naiman, Harsha Ram, Anne Nesbet, and Viktor Zhivov, and I am further indebted to Joachim Klein for sharing his expertise on topics as varied as pastoral poetry and the history of the Belomor Canal. I owe Irina Paperno and Olga Matich a special debt of gratitude for their generous support and care. They have fundamentally and indelibly shaped how I think.
Thanks go to all the editors and staff at NIU Press and Cornell Press, including Christine D. Worobec, Jennifer Savran Kelly, and especially Amy Farranto for her support through the life changes that occurred between the contract and final manuscript. I am grateful to Andy Bruno and Thomas Newlin, who reviewed this manuscript for NIU Press and who took time, in the midst of a pandemic, to generously share their ideas and discuss specific problems. Any shortcomings in this text are my own, of course.
A formative influence on this book was the Eurasian Environments conference in 2011 at Ohio State University, organized by Nicholas Breyfogle. This was my first encounter with environmental history, and my thanks go to the participants of that conference for having shared their work and welcomed a Slavist into their midst, with special thanks to Nicholas Breyfogle, Maya Peterson, Andy Bruno, Pey-Yi Chu, and Julia Obertreis. I am also grateful to Mark Bassin, Jane Costlow, Irina Sandomirskaia, and Jillian Porter for sharing ideas or reading parts of this material at various stages.
In the course of working on this project, I received support from the US Department of State, the Slavic Department and Dean’s Office at the University of California, Berkeley, and Colgate University. The Summer Research Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University provided support for the use of their library collections. Having spent the final months revising this manuscript under the unprecedented conditions of the closure of every library in the United States, I am especially grateful to have had access to these and other wonderful library collections at earlier stages. Global quarantine is not the most felicitous time to seek image permissions, and I thank all those who helped me to obtain them where it was possible: Molly Brunson for sharing invaluable advice; Gainee Nurkabayeva, Christopher Baker, Gul’zira Moldasheva, Altynzhan Khozhamuratova and all the directors and staff of the A. Kasteyev Art Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
Finally, while completing this manuscript, I received an unexpected letter from Professor Anvar Kacimov, a hydrologist and applied mathematician who worked in Kara-Kum Desert in the Soviet period and who now carries out work in the deserts of Oman. I am grateful to Professor Kacimov for sharing with me his thoughts about Platonov, Soviet engineering, and the nostalgia he feels for a country that no longer exists. May we, as Slavists, remain caretakers of the intellectual traditions, ways of reading, lifeworlds, and hopes of this phantom country. In this state of existential homelessness, let us be warmed by fellow feeling and united in the devotional act of reading.