1.Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977), 86.
1.Maurice Hindus, Green Worlds: An Informal Chronicle (New York: Doubleday, 1938), 32.
2.To mention those works closest to this project: J. R. McNeill and Verena Winiwarter, eds., Soils and Societies: Perspectives from Environmental History (Milton Keynes, UK: White Horse Press, 2006); Edward R. Landa and Christian Feller, eds., Soil and Culture (New York: Springer, 2010); William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth (New York : W.W. Norton & Co., 2007); David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Olli Lagerspetz, Philosophy of Dirt (London: Reaktion Books, 2018); Pey-Yi Chu, The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020).
3.Elena Hellberg-Hirn, Soil and Soul: The Symbolic World of Russianness (New York: Routledge, 2019), 192.
4.Maksim Gor’kii, Sobranie sochinenii v 16 tomakh (Moscow: Izd. Pravda, 1979), 7:7.
5.Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 270.
6.On re-enchantment, see Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
7.For these mythological embodiments of soil, see Christian Feller, Lydie Chapuis-Lardy, and Fiorenzo Ugolini, “The Representation of Soil in the Western Art: From Genesis to Pedogenesis,” in Soil and Culture, ed. Edward R. Landa and Christian Feller, 3–21 (New York: Springer, 2010); Joanna Hubbs, Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 20–21.
8.Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 2.
9.Paul Josephson describes the Soviet development imperative as an “exaggeration of modernity.” Josephson, An Environmental History of Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2.
10.This phrase is from Brezhev’s memoirs of the Virgin Lands campaign. Leonid Brezhnev, Tselina (Moscow: Izd. politicheskoi literatury, 1980), 3. For an authoritative history of Russian and Soviet agricultural experimentation over a crucial century of modernization, see O. Iu. Elina, Ot tsarskikh sadov do sovetskikh polei: Istoriia sel’skokhoziastvenniakh opytnykh uchrezhdenii XVIII–20-e gody XX veka: V dvukh tomakh. Moscow: Institut istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki RAN, 2008.
11.Christopher Breu, Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2014).
12.Heather Sullivan, “Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 529.
13.Maya K. Peterson, Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia's Aral Sea Basin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), and Julia Obertreis, Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860–1991 (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2017).
14.W. J. T. Mitchell, “Geopoetics: Space, Place, and Landscape,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2000): 173–174.
15.Mark Bassin has produced a large body of work illuminating the construction of Eurasian space. See especially Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Mark Bassin, Christopher Ely, Melissa K. Stockdale, eds., Space, Place, and Power in Modern Russia: Essays in the New Spatial History (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). See also Christopher Ely, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002); Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman, eds., The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003); Emma Widdis, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). Jane Costlow attends to both the cultural construction and the nature of the Russian forest in Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-Century Forest (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
16.Donald Worster, “Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History,” Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (1990): 1101.
17.Worster, 1093.
18.Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 6.
19.Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39,” Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (1989): 387.
20.Sullivan, “Dirt Theory,” 515.
21.William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996): 25.
22.For more on this perspective, see Benjamin Cohen, Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 201.
23.Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 27.
24.Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 3.
25.Justus Liebig, Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology, 3rd ed. (London: Taylor & Walton, 1843), 178.
26.A. Platonov, “Dzhan,” in Proza (Moscow: Slovo, 1999), 454.
27.For an overview of the field of Eurasian environmental history, see Andy Bruno, “Russian Environmental History: Directions and Potentials,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 3 (2007): 635–650. To mention a few works on the establishment of Soviet nature preserves, see Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); on forest conservation, see Stephen Brain, Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism, 1905–1953 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011); on the agency of Soviet scientists, see Chu, Life of Permafrost, and Marc Elie, “Formulating the Global Environment: Soviet Soil Scientists and the International Desertification Discussion, 1968–91,” Slavonic and East European Review 93, no. 1 (2015): 181–204.
28.Bruno, The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 12.
29.On nonhuman actors, see Bruno, Nature of Soviet Power; Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York: Norton, 2019). On posthuman perspectives, see Colleen McQuillen and Julia Vaingurt, eds., The Human Reimagined: Posthumanism in Russia (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2018).
30.The journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism has been a center of debates on “green Marxism.” See also John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). For works that revisit and recuperate Soviet materialist thought, see Oxana Timofeeva, “Living in a Parasite: Marx, Serres, Platonov, and the Animal Kingdom,” Rethinking Marxism 28, no. 1 (2016): 91–107; Maria Chehonadskih, “The Stofflichkeit of the Universe: Alexander Bogdanov and the Soviet Avant-garde,” e-flux Journal 88 (2018), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/88/174279/the-stofflichkeit-of-the-universe-alexander-bogdanov-and-the-soviet-avant-garde; McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2015).
31.On the construction of nature, see Bruce Braun and Noel Castree, Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium (London: Routledge, 1998). On the limits of constructionism and the cultural-linguistic turn, see Breu, Insistence of the Material.
32.As McNeill and Winiwarter write, “Soils have their own histories, both natural and human … which in turn shape their human histories.” J. R. McNeill and Verena Winiwarter, “Soils, Soil Knowledge, and Environmental History: An Introduction,” in Soils and Societies, 3.
33.L. Trotskii, Literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow: Krasnaia nov’, 1923), 186.
1.M. A. Antonovich, “Strizham (Poslanie ober-strizhu, gospodinu Dostoevskomu),” (1864), reprinted in Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo khudozh. lit-ry, 1961). All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. Antonovich may also be poking fun at the famous cliché of Strakhov’s sympathizer, Apollon Grigorev, who wrote that “Pushkin—nashe vse” [Pushkin is our everything].
2.For a discussion of the “question” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Holly Case, The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).
3.Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018).
4.Irina Sandomirskaia provides a synchronic analysis of the soil/roots cultural myth in Soviet culture and beyond. Irina Sandomirskaia, Kniga o rodine: Opyt analiza diskursivnykh praktik (Vienna: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 2001). On the European philosophical reception of this metaphor, see Christy Wampole, Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
5.Johann Gottfried Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. J. Churchill (New York: Bergman, 1977), 483.
6.V. G. Belinskii, “Opyt sistemy nravstvennoi filosofii,” in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh (Moscow: OGIZ GIKhL, 1948), 2: 244. Apollon Grigor’ev, Apologiia pochvennichestva, ed. and commentary A. V. Belova (Moscow: Institut russkoi tsivilizatsii, 2008), 94.
7.N. V. Gogol’, “Shletser, Muller, Gerder,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 14 tomakh (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1952), 8: 86, 89.
8.For example, Serhiy Bilenky offers only a brief description of Herder’s ideas in Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). For a discussion of Herder’s influence in aesthetic debates, see David L. Cooper, Creating the Nation: Identity and Aesthetics in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia and Bohemia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010).
9.Andrzej Walicki refers to this as the distinction between “type” and evolutionary stage: Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 514.
10.D. C. Phillips, “Organicism in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of the History of Ideas 31, no. 3 (1970): 413–432.
11.Amanda Jo Goldstein, “Sweet Science”: Romantic Materialism and the New Sciences of Life (Berkeley: University of California, 2011), 7.
12.For an alternative view, see Edgar B. Schick, Metaphorical Organicism in Herder’s Early Works: A Study of the Relation of Herder’s Literary Idiom to His World-View (The Hague: Mouton, 1971).
13.Immanuel Kant, review of Herder’s Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, quoted in G. A. Wells, “Man and Nature: An Elucidation of Coleridge’s Rejection of Herder’s Thought,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 51, no. 3 (1952): 315–316.
14.Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy, 26.
15.Herder, 26.
16.Quoted in Robert Reinhold Ergang, Herder and the Foundations of German Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 95.
17.Quoted in Ergang, 88.
18.Mark Bassin, “ ‘Blood or Soil? The Volkisch Movement, the Nazis, and the Legacy of Geopolitik,” in How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich, ed. Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 207.
19.Ergang, Herder, 94.
20.Johann Gottfried Herder, Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings, trans. and ed. Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 110. Translation emended.
21.Herder, 110.
22.Michel Serres, The Natural Contract (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 120.
23.As Robert Ergang notes, Herder used a variety of terms corresponding to “national spirit”: Nationalgeist, Seele des Volks, Geist der Nation, Genius des Volks, and Geist des Volks. See Ergang, Herder, 85.
24.Otto Schlüter, “Über den Grundriss der Städte,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin 34, no. 6 (1899): 446–462.
25.K. Arabazhin, “Gerder,” Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz i Efron, 1892), 8: 471–473.
26.N. M. Karamzin, “O liubvi k otechestvu i narodnoi gordosti,” in Izbrannye sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1964), 2: 281.
27.Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy, 32.
28.Herder, 32.
29.Karamzin, “O liubvi,” 2: 281.
30.Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy, 32.
31.Peter Chaadaev, Major Works of Peter Chaadaev, trans. and commentary Raymond T. McNally (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 38.
32.Nikolai Berdiaev, Russkaia ideia (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2008), 56.
33.A. S. Khomiakov, “O sel’skoi obshchine,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii Alekseia Stepanovicha Khomiakova (Moscow: Univ. tip., 1900), 3: 461.
34.Khomiakov, 462.
35.See Jakob Grimm, Kleinere Schriften (Berlin: Dümmler, 1871), 5: 452. (“Alle meine Arbeiten wandten sich auf das Vaterland, von dessen Boden sie auch.”)
36.I. S. Aksakov, “Vozvrat k narodnoi zhizni putem samosoznaniia,” Den’, October 14, 1861.
37.Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy, 29. Translation modified.
38.Karamzin, “O liubvi,” 287.
39.A. S. Khomiakov, “O vozmozhnosi russkoi khudozhestvennoi shkoly,” in Russkaia estetika i kritika 40–50-x godov XIX veka, eds. V. K. Kantor and A. L. Ospovat (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1982), 137.
40.Dostoevsky appears to have been an important source of the oft-repeated declaration that Russians should not accept that their only function is to “manure” the national soil for the happiness of future generations. Berdiaev later returned to the same topos: “Every living generation merely manures the soil for the benefit of the generation which follows.” Nikolai Berdiaev, The Beginning and the End, trans. R. M. French (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 148.
41.M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, “Nedokonchennye besedy,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg: Izd. A. F. Marksa, 1906), 6: 238.
42.Speech by P. A. Stolypin, May 5, 1908, in the State Duma. Reprinted in P. A. Stolypin, Nam nuzhna velikaia Rossiia (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1991), 149.
43.Voltaire, History of the Russian Empire, vol. 18, pt. 1 of The Works of Voltaire (New York: Dumont, 1901), 118–119.
44.Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994).
45.Herder, Journal Meiner Reise im Jahre 1769 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1947), 12.
46.Karamzin, “O liubvi,” 284.
47.Belinskii, “Literaturnye mechtaniia” (1841), in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 1:38.
48.Belinskii, “Obshchee znachenie slova literatura” (1841), in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 2: 113–114.
49.Victor Terras, Belinskij and Russian Literary Criticism: The Heritage of Organic Aesthetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 125.
50.Wayne Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor’ev, and Native Soil Conservatism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 9.
51.Fedor Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), 18: 36.
52.Apollon Grigoryev, My Literary and Moral Wanderings and Other Autobiographical Material, trans. Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962), 63.
53.Quoted in Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor’ev, 44.
54.Grigor’ev, Apologiia pochvennichestva, 464.
55.Apollon Grigor’ev, “Stikhotvoreniia N. Nekrasova,” in Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 2: 322.
56.Grigor’ev, Apologiia pochvennichestva, 18.
57.Grigor’ev, 304.
58.Aleksandr Blok, “Sud’ba Apollona Grigor’eva,” in Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Terra, 2009), 5: 387.
59.Linda Gerstein, Nikolai Strakhov (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 44.
60.Grigorev’s organic criticism has an affinity with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s phylogeny of literature, which was likewise influenced by Herderian organicism. Schick, Metaphorical Organicism, 119.
61.Grigoryev, Literary and Moral Wanderings, 63.
62.Grigor’ev, Apologiia pochvennichestva, 292.
63.Grigor’ev, 137.
64.Grigor’ev, 138.
65.Grigor’ev, 139.
66.Grigor’ev, 139.
67.Antonovich, “O pochve,” in Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i, 15.
68.Nikolai Strakhov, Iz istorii literaturnogo nigilizma, 1861–1865 (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia brat. Panteleevykh, 1890), 108.
69.Gerstein, Nikolai Strakhov, 8, 10, 160.
70.Bella Grigoryan, Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762–1861 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018).
71.Antonovich, “Strizham (Poslanie ober-strizhu, gospodinu Dostoevskomu),” 182.
72.See Gerstein, Nikolai Strakhov, 158. Strakhov’s works on Darwin include “Perevorot v nauke” (1872) and Prosledovateli i protivniki (1873). Danilevskii published a massive two-volume work on Darwin shortly before his death in 1885.
73.Robert E. MacMaster, Danilevsky: A Russian Totalitarian Philosopher (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 78, 199; Walicki, Slavophile Controversy, 513–514. For discussion of the influence of Cuvier and Herder on understandings of the nation and the “economy of space” in nineteenth-century Russia, see Anindita Banerjee, We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), 26–29.
74.N. Ia. Danilevskii, Rossiia i Evropa (Moscow: Kniga, 1991), 91–92. All subsequent references are to the English translation unless otherwise noted: Nikolai Iakovlevich Danilevskii, Russia and Europe, trans. Stephen M. Woodburn (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2013), 84.
75.Danilevskii, Russia and Europe, 342–372.
76.In this, it resembles the richness of ancient Greece, or present-day Europe, according to Danilevskii.
77.Danilevskii, Russia and Europe, 76.
78.Stephen M. Woodburn notes, in Danilevskii, Russia and Europe, 76.
79.Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy, 31.
80.Herder, 31.
81.Danilevskii, Russia and Europe, 82–84.
82.Danilevskii, 82.
83.Danilevskii, 82.
84.Danilevskii, 226.
85.Danilevskii, 226.
86.Danilevskii, 226–227.
87.Danilevskii, 237.
88.Danilevskii, 82.
89.Danilevskii, 82.
90.Danilevskii, 82–83. Translation slightly emended.
91.Danilevskii, 83.
92.Danilevskii, Rossiia i Evropa, 60–61 (my translation).
93.Danilevskii, Russia and Europe, 371. The myth of virgin land in Russia is the subject of the final chapter of this book.
94.Danilevskii, 73.
95.Danilevskii, 77.
96.Danilevskii, 83.
97.Danilevskii, 83.
98.Danilevskii, 538.
99.Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 1: 537.
100.Dostoevsky, 1: 538.
101.Dostoevsky, 1: 520.
102.Danilevskii, Rossiia i Evropa, 60.
103.Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Adolescent, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 2003), 63. In his notes for the novel, Dostoevsky planned for the conversation to take place in a field of manure.
104.David Moon, “The Debate over Climate Change in the Steppe Region in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” Russian Review 69 (April 2010): 266.
105.Vladimir Sergeevich Solov’ev, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, Inst. filosofii: Izd-vo “Mysl,” 1988), 2: 491–492.
106.Solov’ev, 2: 482–483.
107.The anxiety that “Asian” soil undermined Russian development crystalized in the Soviet period in the trope of the Asiatic mode of production, the topic of chapter 4.
108.For a discussion of how Russian soil science and terminology moved outside Russia’s borders, see Jan Arend, “Russian Science in Translation: How Pochvovedenie Was Brought to the West, c. 1875–1945,” Kritika 18, no. 4 (2017): 683–708.
109.For more on Dokuchaev, see Catherine Evtuhov, “The Roots of Dokuchaev’s Scientific Contributions: Cadastral Soil Mapping and Agro-Environmental Issues,” in Footprints in the Soil: People and Ideas in Soil History, ed. Benno P. Warkentin (Boston: Elsevier, 2006), 125–148, and Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011); David Moon, “The Environmental History of the Russian Steppes: Vasilii Dokuchaev and the Harvest Failure of 1891,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 15 (2005), and The Plough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and on the wider influence of Dokuchaev’s soil science on environmental thought, see Jonathan D. Oldfield and Denis J. B. Shaw, The Development of Russian Environmental Thought: Scientific and Geographical Perspectives on the Natural Environment (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016), 48–77.
110.V. V. Dokuchaev, Russkii chernozem (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Deklerona i Evdokimova, 1883), 352.
111.Quoted in V. V. Dokuchaev, Russian Chernozem, trans. N. Kaner (Jerusalem: Israel Program for Scientific Translations, 1967), 2.
112.Andy Bruno makes a related argument about the “Eurasian” character of the scientific work of geologist Aleksandr Fersman. Andy Bruno, “A Eurasian Mineralogy: Aleksandr Fersman’s Conception of the Natural World,” Isis 107, no. 3 (2016): 518–539.
113.Pavel V. Krasilnikov and Joe A. Tabor, “Perspectives on Utilitarian Ethnopedology,” Geoderma 111, no. 3/4 (2003): 197. Russian soil terminology was universalized through Dokuchaev’s system: Russian vernacular terms for soil types were adopted as standard terms, used to describe soils around the world to this day. The question of the universality of these soil terms is still under debate.
114.Dokuchaev, Russkii chernozem, 42.
115.Richard G. Robbins, Famine in Russia 1891–1892: The Imperial Government Responds to a Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 7. A British commercial attaché, E. F. G. Law, estimated that over 35 million people were in need of food aid. Moon, “Environmental History,” 149.
116.D. N. Anuchin, ed., Pomoshch’ golodaiushchim: Nauchno-literaturnyi sbornik (Moscow: Russkie vedomosti, 1892).
117.Moon, “Environmental History,” 165.
118.Bassin, “Blood or Soil?,” 204–242.
119.There is a note of patriotic outrage in Wolfgang Gesemann’s claims that “there is little evidence of Russians quoting Herder directly in the 18th and 19th centuries.” While direct quotes may be limited, many nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals refer to his work, and his ideas are absolutely pervasive. Gesemann, “Herder’s Russia,” Journal of the History of Ideas 26, no. 3 (1965): 424–434.
1.“Obituary: Justus Liebig,” Chemical News 27, no. 700 (1873): 206.
2.Olga Elina notes that in addition to Liebig, the agricultural scientists Humphry Davy, Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, and Albrecht Thaer were widely discussed in Russia in this period. Olga Elina, “Planting Seeds for the Revolution: The Rise of Russian Agricultural Science, 1860–1920,” Science in Context 15, no. 2 (2002): 211–212.
3.Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846–1895 (New York: International Publishers, 1942), 204. I discuss Marx’s reading of Liebig further below.
4.William H. Brock, Justus von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 98.
5.For further context on Liebig, see Brock, Justus von Liebig, and E. Patrick Munday, “Sturm und Dung: Justus von Liebig and the Chemistry of Agriculture” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1990).
6.A. A. Rode, Soil Science (Jerusalem: Israel Program for Scientific Translations, 1962), 5.
7.Liebig, Chemistry, 178.
8.For more on the use of “Stoffwechsel” in German, see Robert U. Ayres and Leslie Ayres, A Handbook of Industrial Ecology (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2002), 16–17.
9.Liebig, Chemistry, 147.
10.Liebig, 54.
11.Brock, Justus von Liebig, 27.
12.Justus Liebig, Familiar Letters on Chemistry in Its Relations to Physiology, Dietetics, Agriculture, Commerce, and Political Economy, 4th ed. (London: Taylor, Walton, & Maberly, 1859), 26.
13.Quoted in Brock, Justus von Liebig, 194.
14.Alexander Vucinich notes four major lineages of Russian chemistry: “It was virtually impossible to find a Russian chemist of the time who had not taken a course from Justus von Liebig at Giessen, Heinrich Rose at Berlin, R. W. Bunsen at Heidelberg, or Marcellin Berthelot at the College de France.” Alexander S. Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture: 1861–1917 (Stanford, CA: Stanford U. Press, 1970), 136. The term “chemist breeder” was coined by J. B. Morrell, see “The Chemist Breeders,” Ambix 19 (1972): 1–46.
15.For more on Liebig’s influence on the development of chemistry in nineteenth-century Russia, see Iu. S. Musabekov, Iustus Libikh, 1803–1873 (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1962), 169–177.
16.Geert Vanpaemel notes that although German scientific practices and institutions were looked to as an ideal model, they were rarely “copied” precisely but were adapted to local conditions at the “periphery.” See Vanpaemel, “The German Model of Laboratory Science and the European Periphery (1860–1914),” in Sciences in the Universities of Europe, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Academic Landscapes, eds. Ana Simões, Maria Paula Diogo, and Kōstas Gavroglou (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 211–225.
17.The short work Artificial Fertilizers (Iskusstvennye udobreniia ili tuki) was published in Petersburg in 1850. This may be a translation of the 1845 pamphlet An Address to the Agriculturists of Great Britain Explaining the Principles and Use of Artificial Fertilizers, which was designed to explain and promote Liebig’s patent fertilizers.
18.A. N. Engel’gardt, “Libikh v russkom perevode,” Sankt Peterburgskie vedomosti, December 6, 1863, 1105–1106.
19.Iustus Libikh, Khimiia v prilozhenii k zemledeliu i fiziologii rastenii, 7th ed., trans. P. A. Il’enkov (Braunschweig: Fiveg and Son, 1864).
20.V. Kurilov, “Libikh” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, ed. I. E. Andreevskii (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz i Efron, 1896), 17a: 640. The author was echoing the assessment of German chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann.
21.For a discussion of the role of the kruzhok in the formation of the Russian Chemical Society, see Michael D. Gordin, “The Heidelberg Circle: German Inflections on the Professionalization of Russian Chemistry in the 1860s,” Osiris 23, no. 1 (2008): 23–49.
22.Dostoevsky parodies the Russian reader of Liebig: “This rival of Liebig, who maybe didn’t even finish a course in high school, and who of course wouldn’t get into arguing with Liebig about his superiority if someone pointed out that it was Liebig…. It would be another thing if, for example, he met Liebig not knowing that it was Liebig, say in a train car. And if they began a conversation about chemistry and our gentleman managed to stick with the conversation, then, no doubt, he would carry out the most learned debate, knowing of chemistry just one word: ‘chemistry.’ Liebig would be surprised, of course, but—who knows—our gentleman might be considered the winner in the eyes of a spectator. For there are almost no limits to the brazenness of a Russian’s scientific language.” Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelia (1873), in Polnoe sobranie sochinenie, 21:121.
23.Gordin, “Heidelberg Circle,” 29.
24.Gordin, 29.
25.Nicholas Riasanovskii, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 218.
26.Victoria S. Frede, “Materialism and the Radical Intelligentsia: The 1860s” in A History of Russian Philosophy, 1830–1930; Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity, eds. G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 71.
27.Moleschott, who represented a younger generation of materialists, wrote several works polemicizing with Liebig, including The Cycle of Life: Physiological Replies to Liebig’s Chemical Letters (Der Kreislauf des Lebens: physiologische Antworten auf Liebig’s Chemische Briefe, 1852). For more on Liebig’s differences with the young materialists, see Brock, Justus von Liebig, 311.
28.Robin Feuer Miller, “Fathers and Children,” in Ivan Turgenev, ed. Harold Bloom (Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 2003), 23.
29.Miller, 23.
30.I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos’mi tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1964), 8: 259–260.
31.Nikolai Chernyshevskii, Chto delat’?: Iz rasskazov o novykh liudiakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1975), 123. The English translation is taken from Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is To Be Done?, trans. Michael R. Katz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 180.
32.Irina Paperno addresses the Christian symbolism of this scene in Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 215–217.
33.For more on the rivalry between Lawes and Liebig, see Brock, Justus von Liebig, 121–122.
34.Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, 204.
35.See John Bellamy Foster, Ecology against Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 154–170; “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology, 105, no. 2 (1999): 366–405. See also Joan Martinez Alier, “Marxism, Social Metabolism, and International Trade,” in Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change, eds. Alf Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, and Joan Martinez Alier (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2007), 221–237.
36.Liebig, Letters on Chemistry, 473.
37.Liebig, Chemistry, 178.
38.Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes and David Fernbach (London: Penguin Classics, 1991), 3: 949.
39.Foster, “Marx’s Theory,” 366–405.
40.Friedrich Engels, “The Housing Question” in On Historical Materialism: A Collection, ed. T. Borodulina (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 158.
41.D. I. Pisarev, “Ocherki iz istorii truda” in Istoricheskie eskizy: Izbrannye stat’i (Moscow: Izd-vo “Pravda,” 1989), 105.
42.Danilevskii, Russia and Europe, 59.
43.Cathy Frierson, introduction to Aleksandr Nikolaevich Engelgardt’s Letters from the Country, 1872–1887, trans. and ed. Cathy Frierson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5.
44.A. N. Engel’gardt, Iz derevni. 12 pisem. 1872–1887, ed. A. V. Tikhonova (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1999), 420–421.
45.Justus Liebig, Sechs unbekannte Briefe J. Liebigs an den russischen Chemiker P. A. Il’enkov (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1960), 6–7.
46.Elina, Ot tsarskikh sadov, 204–210.
47.Engel’gardt, Iz derevni, 370. Engelgardt’s use of the term “soil particles” is idiosyncratic; he presumably means minerals.
48.Engel’gardt, 371.
49.Engel’gardt, 371.
50.Engel’gardt, 372.
51.Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 149.
52.Foster, 150.
53.Boris Kagarlitsky, Empire of the Periphery: Russia and the World System (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 172–173, 190–191.
54.Quoted in Kagarlitsky, 223.
55.Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 284.
56.Liebig, Chemistry, 178.
57.The first soil classification maps were produced in Crimea in 1856, the very year that the Crimean war ended. Ralph J. McCracken and Douglas Helms, “Soil Surveys and Maps,” in The Literature of Soil Science, ed. Peter McDonald (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 277.
58.V. F. Odoevskii, “Nedovol’no,” in Besedy v Obshchestve liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti pri Imperatorskom moskovskom universitete (Moscow: Obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti, 1867), 77.
59.Odoevskii, 78.
60.Lenin directly alludes to Liebig in Marxist Views on the Agrarian Question in Europe and in Russia, in which he writes that “there is no doubt that capitalism has upset the equilibrium between the exploitation of the land and fertilization of the land (the role of the separation of the town from the countryside).” Vladimir Lenin, “Marxist Views on the Agrarian Question in Europe and in Russia” in V. I. Lenin, Lenin’s Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1961), 6: 345.
61.Lenin devoted an entire section of The History of Capitalism in Russia to Engelgardt’s life and work. V. I. Lenin, “Istoriia khoziastva Engel’gardta” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii V. I. Lenina, 5th ed. (Moscow: Gos. izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1961), 3: 32.
62.V. G. Mineev, “Udobrenie” in Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 3rd ed., ed. A. M. Prokhorov (Moscow: Gos. nauch. izd-vo “Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia,” 1977), 26: 479.
63.Edward Hallett Carr, The Russian Revolution: From Lenin to Stalin (1917–1929) (London: Macmillan, 1979), 52.
64.This equalizing “system of barter” between city and countryside did not function as expected, as the 1923 scissors crisis showed.
1.Quoted in Gogol’, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 6: 907, n2.
2.Douglas draws on William James’s formulation in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966), 36.
3.Robin suggests that these debates assume as their “ideological horizon … a parascientific ideology that does not operate on the terrain of science but continually skirts it.” Régine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 83.
4.Ioakhim Klein, Russkaia literatura v XVIII veke (Moscow: Indrik, 2010), 172.
5.J. R. Morgan, Introduction to Daphnis and Chloe by Longus (Oxford: Aris & Phillips, 2004), 6–7.
6.Ioakhim Klein, Russkaia literatura, 172.
7.On Russian pastoral poetry and its influence on other genres, see T. V. Sas’kova, Pastoral’ v russkoi poezii XVIII veka (Moscow: MGOPU, 1999).
8.Thomas Newlin, The Voice in the Garden: Andrei Bolotov and the Anxieties of the Russian Pastoral, 1738–1833 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 140.
9.Williams, Country and City, 12 et passim. For a discussion of Pushkin’s subversion of the locus amoenus in the poem “The Countryside,” see Stephanie Sandler, Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 23–39.
10.Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 241–264.
11.Poggioli, 262.
12.Belinskii, “Literaturnye mechtaniia,” in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 1: 15–16 et passim.
13.Quoted in Vadim Shkolnikov, “Imperial Realism: Belinsky and the Wretched of the Earth,” Ulbandus Review 7 (2003): 69.
14.Quoted in Ronald D. Leblanc, “Teniers, Flemish Art, and the Natural School Debate,” Slavic Review 50, no. 3 (1991): 580.
15.Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1996), 17–18. All citations are from the translation unless otherwise noted.
16.Gogol, 18.
17.Gogol, 39–40.
18.Gogol, 57.
19.V. G. Belinskii, “Ob’’iasnenie na ob’’iasnenie po povodu poemy Gogolia ‘Mertvye dushi,’ ” in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 2: 341.
20.Gogol’, Mertvye dushi II, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7: 57, 60. Here and in the following quote, the translation is mine, as the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation lacks these passages.
21.Gogol’, 63.
22.Grigoryan, Noble Subjects, 89–95.
23.Quoted in A. G. Tseitlin, Stanovlenie realizma v russkoi literature: Russkii fiziologicheskii ocherk (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), 92.
24.For a history of the physiological sketch, see Tseitlin.
25.Ivan Turgenev had contributed the story “Three Portraits” and the poem “The Squire” to the Petersburg Miscellany.
26.Grigorovich’s sketches in The Physiology of Petersburg are “Petersburg Organ-grinders” (“Peterburgskie sharmanshchiki”) and “The Lottery Ball” (“Lotereinii bal”).
27.D. V. Grigorovich, “Derevnia,” in Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Leningrad: Gos. izd-vo khudozh. lit-ry, 1959), 47.
28.Grigorovich, 26, 29.
29.Grigorovich, 43.
30.Grigorovich, 59.
31.D. V. Grigorovich, Literaturnye vospominaniia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1987), 92–93.
32.I. A. Krylov, “Petukh i zhemchuzhoe zerno,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Gosizdat. khud. lit., 1946) 3: 51.
33.V. G. Belinskii, “Povesti, skazki i rasskazy Kazaka Luganskogo,” Sovremennik 1 (1847): 135–136. Emendment and emphasis mine. Belinskii refers to a cartoon by M. L. Nevakhovich in Eralash 1 (1847): 5, which depicts Grigorovich rummaging in a garbage pit. Bulgarin praised the caricature in Severnaia pchela no. 20, Jan. 25, 1847. See primechaniia in V. G. Belinskii, Polnoe sobraniie sochinenii (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1956), 10: 440.
34.Elisabeth Ladenson, Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from “Madame Bovary” to “Lolita” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 51; Jessica Tanner, “Branding Naturalism: Dirt, Territory, and Zola’s Aesthetics,” Dix-Neuf 23, no. 2 (2019): 78, 72, 82.
35.Zola theorized “naturalism” in the forward to the second edition of his novel Thérèse Raquin.
36.Tanner, “Branding Naturalism,” 80.
37.Émile Zola, The Experimental Novel, trans. Belle M. Sherman (New York: Cassell Publishing, 1893), 58.
38.V. G. Belinskii, “Pis’mo I. S. Turgenevu 1/13 marta 1847,” in Sobranie sochinenii v deviatykh tomakh (Moscow: Khud. lit., 1982), 9: 625.
39.Belinskii, “Otvet Moskvitianinu,” Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 3: 738.
40.P. A. Karatygin, Zapiski (Leningrad: Izd. Isskustvo, 1970), 268.
41.A. V. Nikitenko, the so-called head of the natural school, echoed these aesthetic values, observing that future writers would “find not only dirt, but gold as well.” Quoted in Kenneth E. Harper, “Criticism of the Natural School in the 1840s,” American Slavic and East European Review 15, no. 3 (1956): 404.
42.Belinskii, “O zhizni i sochineniiakh Kol’tsova,” in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 3: 137.
43.Karatygin, Zapiski, 268. This language strangely anticipates the later critique of Zola by his former protegees: “a note ordurière est exacerbée encore, descendue à des saletés si basses que, par instants, on se croirait devant un recueil de scatologie: le Maître est descendu au fond de l’immondice’.” Quoted in Tanner, “Branding Naturalism,” 82.
44.Belinskii, “Literaturnyi razgovor, podslushannyi v knizhnoi lavke,” in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 2: 313.
45.On the influence of Hegel on Belinskii’s aesthetics, see Terras, Belinskij.
46.V. G. Belinskii, “Pis’mo N. V. Gogoliu 15 iulia 1847 g.,” in N. V. Gogol’ v russkoi kritike: sbornik statei, eds. A. K. Kotov and M. Ia. Poliakov (Moscow: Gos izd khud lit, 1953), 244.
47.Quoted in Harper, “Criticism,” 404.
48.Pisemskii’s 1853 “Leshii” is the story of a depraved lackey, Parmenov, who comes from the city to manage the estate of his absent master, bringing urban infection with him into the countryside. The tale generically infects the topos of the countryside with the narrative methods of the urban physiological sketch.
49.I draw on the work of Jennifer Tanner, who applies Serres’s theory to Zola’s “branding” of naturalism. Tanner, “Branding Naturalism.”
50.Gleb Uspenskii, “Tishe vody, nizhe travy,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: Akademii nauk, 1941), 3: 193.
51.Aleksei Pisemskii, Liudi sorokovykh godov in Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1984), 5: 89. The pervasive griaz’ in this work is both material and moral; the griaz’ on their boots mirrors the griaz’ in their moral conduct.
52.D. I. Pisarev, “Stoiachaia voda” in Sochineniia (Moscow: Gos. izd. khud. lit., 1955), 1: 172.
53.Pushkin, “Ruslan i Liudmila,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Leningrad: Izd. nauka, 1977), 4: 8.
54.Pisarev, “Stoiachnaia voda,” 174.
55.Pisarev, 172.
56.Evgeniia Basovskaia, Sovetskaia pressa: Za “chistotu iazyka”: 60 let borby (Moscow: RGGU, 2011), 76.
57.Michael S. Gorham, “Mastering the Perverse: State Building and Language ‘Purification’ in Early Soviet Russia,” Slavic Review 59, no. 1 (2000): 144–147.
58.Cf. Robin, Socialist Realism, 166 et passim; Hans Gunther, “Soviet Literary Criticism and the Formulation of the Aesthetics of Socialist Realism, 1932–1940,” in A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism, eds. Evgeny Dobrenko and Galin Tihanov (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), 93–95. On the relationship between realism as a historically situated (nineteenth-century) artistic movement and as “a transhistorical mode” whose object is maximally truthful mimesis, see Molly Brunson, Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840–1890 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), 2–3.
59.Gunther, “Soviet Literary Criticism,” 97.
60.Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 285.
61.Fedor Panferov, Bruski (Moscow: OGIZ, 1947), 6.
62.Panferov, 19.
63.Panferov, 24.
64.Panferov, 44. I am grateful to Alexander Nakhimovsky for sharing his insights on this passage.
65.The text of Bruski was under construction and editions vary. Many scatological scenes were redacted from later editions as part of the ongoing sanitization of the text, so I quote from the first volume of the multivolume 1930 edition here and in some passages that follow. Fedor Panferov, Bruski (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1930), 1: 97.
66.Panferov, Bruski (1947), 52.
67.Panferov, Bruski (1930), 1: 74.
68.Panferov, 1: 103.
69.Panferov, Bruski (1947), 208.
70.M. Shaginian, “Diskussiia o iazyke,” Literaturnaia gazeta, April 18, 1934, 2.
71.Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd sovetskikh pisatelei: stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Gos. izd. khud. lit., 1934), 151.
72.Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 603.
73.Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 235.
74.Robin, Socialist Realism, 168.
75.Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 316.
76.Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 316.
77.Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 360.
78.Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 360.
79.Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 373.
80.Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 418.
81.E. Permitin, “Pis’mo M. Gor’komu,” Literaturnaia gazeta, March 6, 1934, 2.
82.Per’vyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 243.
83.Evgeniia Basovskaia, Sovetskaia pressa, 80.
84.In footnotes above I indicate these redacted passages.
1.Cf. Mark Neocleous, “The Political Economy of the Dead: Marx’s Vampires,” History of Political Thought 24, no. 4 (2003): 668–684; in the Soviet reception of Marx, Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 148 et passim.
2.V. O. Kliuchevskii, Otzyvy i otvety. Tretii sbornik statei. (Petrograd: Kommissariat Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia, 1918), 2.
3.Michael Kunichika, Our Native Antiquity: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Culture of Russian Modernism (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2015), 287.
4.This was particularly true of the science of child development, which played a crucial role in the Stalinist project to reform the human subject. Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia, trans. Noah Rubins and Maria Rubins (New York: Routledge, 2018), 259–285.
5.L. S. Vygotskii, “K voprosu o dinamike detskogo kharaktera,” in Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh (Moscow: Pegagogika, 1983), 5: 156.
6.V. N. Voloshinov, Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka: Osnovnye problemy sotsiologicheskogo metoda v nauke o iazyke (Leningrad: Proboi, 1930), 49. The authorship of this text is disputed; some scholars attribute it to Bakhtin.
7.Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2003), 150.
8.Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 211.
9.K. Paustovsky, The Black Island, trans. Evgenia Schimanskaya (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1977), 47.
10.Trotskii, Literatura i revoliutsiia, 257–258.
11.Viktor Turin, dir., Turksib (1929; Los Angeles: Flicker Alley, 2011), DVD.
12.Andrei Platonov, “Velikii rabotnik (O razvitii v Rossii vzryvnoi kul’tury),” in Sochineniia, ed. Natal’ia Kornienko (Moscow: IMLI-RAN, 2004), vol. 1, bk. 2: 248.
13.Andrei Platonov, “Pervyi Ivan: fragmenty ocherka,” Oktiabr’ 5 (2004), 121.
14.Andrei Platonov, The Foundation Pit, trans. Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Olga Meerson (New York: New York Review of Books, 2009), 13.
15.Platonov, 13. This association of earth with feminine passivity echoes the discourse of virgin land, discussed in chapter 6.
16.Platonov, 13.
17.Platonov, 19.
18.Platonov, 12.
19.Platonov, 19. Emphasis mine.
20.Platonov, 146.
21.Despite this reversed valuation of Russian soil, Russia’s spatial coordinates between Europe and Asia continued to feature in Soviet art and political rhetoric as a basis for a great world-historical destiny, as had been the case before the October Revolution.
22.For a detailed analysis of this image, see Aglaya Glebova, “ ‘No Longer an Image, Not Yet a Concept’: Montage and the Failure to Cohere in Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Gulag Photoessay,” Art History 42, no. 2 (April 2019): 332–361.
23.Cynthia A. Ruder, Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998); Ioakhim Klein, “Belomorkanal: Literatura i propaganda v stalinskoe vremia,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 71 (2005): 231–262; Ivan Chukhin, Kanaloarmeitsy: Istoriia stroitel’stva Belomorkanala v dokumentakh, tsifrakh, faktakh, fotografiiakh, svidetel’stvakh, uchastnikov i ochevidtsev (Petrozavodsk: Kareliia, 1990); Paul R. Gregory and Valery Lazarev, eds. The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2003); Michael Jakobson, Origins of the Gulag: The Soviet Prison Camp System, 1917–1934 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993); Oleg Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, trans. Vadim Staklo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
24.Ruder, Making History for Stalin, 47.
25.Oleg Khlevniuk, “The Economy of the OGPU, NKVD, and MVD of the USSR, 1930–1953,” in The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag, eds. Paul R. Gregory and Valery Lazarev (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2003), 44. “Spetspereselentsy” or “special settlers” (alleged kulaks) frequently worked in agriculture or forest industries, one prong of the internal colonization of Soviet lands. For more on this special sector of the camps, see Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
26.These agencies came to manage a crucial sector of the Soviet economy. In the early 1930s the agency Gidroproekt emerged under the direction of the NKVD and would later become the main all-Union agency managing “hydroelectric, hydrotechnical, and water-resource construction” for decades, leading even high-profile projects in the developing world, such as the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s. G. G. Lapin, “70 Years of Gidroproekt and Hydroelectric Power in Russia,” Hydrotechnical Construction 34, no. 8/9 (2000): 374.
27.Marx, Capital, 1: 283.
28.Marx, 3: 959.
29.Maksim Gor’kii, “O temakh,” Pravda, Oct. 17, 1933.
30.Evgeny Dobrenko, “Nadzirat’—nakazyvat’—nadzirat’: Sotsrealizm kak pribavochnyi produkt nasiliia,” Revue des études slaves 73, no. 4 (2001), 671.
31.M. Gor’kii, L. L. Averbakh, and S. G. Firin, eds. Belomorsko-Baltiiskii kanal im. Stalina: Istoriia stroitel’stva (Moscow: Istoriia fabrik I zavodov, 1934), 356, 398.
32.Gor’kii, Averbakh, and Firin, 395.
33.Pavel Luknitsky, Soviet Tajikistan (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), 8.
34.Gor’kii, Averbakh, and Firin, Belomorsko-Baltiiskii kanal, 398.
35.Trans. and repr. in Clarence Brown, Mandelshtam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 103. Orig. Osip Mandel’shtam, “Gumanizm i sovremennost’,” in Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khud. lit., 1990), 2:205.
36.Vladimir Paperny, Kul’tura dva (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985), 142–145.
37.Karl August Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957).
38.The ambiguities of Marx and Engels’s shifting conceptions of the AMP are delineated carefully in G. Lichtheim, “Marx and the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production,’ ” in Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought, eds. Bob Jessop and Russell Wheatley (London: Routledge, 1999), 35–58.
39.For a historical perspective on oriental despotism and the AMP, see Marian Sawer, Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977); Anne M. Bailey and Josep R. Llobera, The Asiatic Mode of Production: Science and Politics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).
40.Karl Marx, “The British Rule in India,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, trans. Richard Dixon et al. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979), 12: 127. The “war of devastation” referred to the Mongol conquest, which historians of the time viewed as a calamity that precipitated centuries of Islamic decline.
41.Georgii Plekhanov, Sochineniia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izd., 1924), 10: 154.
42.Samuel H. Baron, Plekhanov in Russian History and Soviet Historiography (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 54–55.
43.Quoted in V. I. Lenin, “The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905–1907,” in Lenin’s Collected Works, 13: 329.
44.Bailey and Llobera, Asiatic Mode of Production, 51.
45.The piatichlenka was formulated by the Russian orientalist V. V. Struve. The five stages of socioeconomic development in the piatichlenka were: primitive-communal, slaveholding, feudal, capitalist, and socialist. Those who believed the AMP was a legitimate political formation were known as aziatchiki.
46.Sawer, Marxism, 52. The Asiatic mode of production was “revived” in 1964.
47.On the ambiguity of the political orientation of the novel, see V. P. Kriuchkov, “Proza B. A. Pil’niaka 1920-x godov: Motivy v funktsional’nomi intertekstual’nom aspektakh” (PhD diss., Saratov State University, 2006), 361.
48.Boris Pil’niak, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh (Moscow: Terra, 2003), 4: 284.
49.For an overview of the critical and scholarly responses to the novel, see Irene Masing-Delic, “Boris Pilniak’s The Volga Falls To The Caspian Sea as Trotskyite Sophiology,” Slavic and East European Journal 52, no. 3 (2008): 414–438.
50.Pil’niak, Sobranie sochinenii, 359.
51.Pil’niak, 415.
52.Pil’niak, 354.
53.Pil’niak, 355.
54.The allusion to the dialectical processes of nature is underscored by reference to “Engels the sociologist and Engels the hydrologist.” Pil’niak, 362.
55.Pil’niak, 423.
56.Pil’niak, 254.
57.Irene Masing-Delic reads the hydroengineering plot as allegory of sexual sublimation, with deserts representing nomadic masculinity. Masing-Delic, “Pilniak’s Volga Falls.”
58.Pil’niak, Sobranie sochinenii, 468.
59.Pil’niak, 468. Poletika’s plan to irrigate the Aral-Caspian Basin is one of many textual elements that echo Andrei Platonov’s novel Dzhan, discussed in the next chapter.
60.Pil’niak, 254-255.
61.Poletika remarks that “the desert is advancing on us, on Western Siberia and European Russia, it is stealing right up to Moscow, and its harbinger is the sukhovei.” Pil’niak, 467.
62.Boris Pil’niak, Sed’maia Sovetskaia (Leningrad: Izd. pisatelei, 1931), 26.
63.Pil’niak, Sobranie sochinenii, 362.
64.Pil’niak, 403.
65.Gary Browning, Boris Pilniak: Scythian at a Typewriter (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985), 124.
66.Pil’niak, Sobranie sochinenii, 270.
67.Pil’niak, 270.
68.Pil’niak, 423.
69.Pil’niak, 324.
70.Pil’niak, 465.
71.Pil’niak, 467.
72.Pil’niak, 240.
73.Pil’niak, 423.
74.Pil’niak, 325–326, 333.
75.Pil’niak, 355.
76.Pil’niak, 356.
77.Pil’niak, 300.
78.Pil’niak, 393.
79.Pil’niak, 375. A gorodovoi was a nineteenth-century policeman.
80.Pil’niak, 247.
81.Pil’niak, 343.
82.Pil’niak, 461.
83.Pil’niak, 288.
84.Pil’niak, 335.
85.Pil’niak, 375.
86.Irene Masing-Delic, “Pilniak’s Volga Falls,” 416.
87.Boris Pil’niak, Mne vypala gor’kaia slava: Pis’ma 1915–1937 (Moscow: Agraf, 2002), 345.
88.Nina Kolesnikoff, Bruno Jasien´ski: His Evolution from Futurism to Socialist Realism (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1983), 8.
89.Bruno Iasenskii, Chelovek meniaet kozhu (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1956), 34; Bruno Jasien´ski, Man Changes His Skin, trans. H. G. Scott (Leningrad: Cooperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1935), 42. All subsequent citations are from the English translation unless otherwise noted.
90.Jasien´ski, Man Changes His Skin, 40.
91.Jasien´ski, 55.
92.Jasien´ski, 45.
93.Jasien´ski, 688–689; 695–696. Translation modified.
94.Andrei Platonov also deploys the figures of sediment and sand as the material remains of the dead in his novel of Turkmenistan, Dzhan, discussed in the next chapter.
95.Jasien´ski, Man Changes His Skin, 696.
96.Jasien´ski, 64.
97.Jasien´ski, 192.
98.Jasien´ski, 273.
99.Jasien´ski, 126.
100.Jasien´ski, 410.
101.Jasien´ski, 162–163.
102.Jasien´ski, 163.
103.Jasien´ski, 281–282.
104.Jasien´ski, 129.
105.Jasien´ski, 61. Translated modified.
106.Jasien´ski, 140.
107.Jasien´ski, 742, 751.
108.Jasien´ski, 45.
109.Jasien´ski, 60.
110.Jasien´ski, 229–230.
111.V. B. Shklovskii, Eizenshtein (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976), 151. Richard Taylor, translator’s note, “The Great Fergana Canal,” by Petr Pavlenko and Sergei Eisenstein, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 5, no. 1 (2011): 123.
112.Naum Kleiman, “Fergana Canal and Tamburlaine’s Tower,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 5, no. 1 (2011): 103.
113.Kleiman, 115.
114.Sergei Eisenstein, “The Film about the Fergana Canal,” trans. Richard Taylor, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 5, no. 1 (2011): 160. The translation is of the original typescript; the first published version, which had been significantly cut and rewritten, appeared in Pravda, August 13, 1939.
115.Eisenstein, “Fergana Canal,” 157.
116.Viktor Shklovsky, Viktor Shklovksy: A Reader, trans. Alexandra Berlina (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 279. Translation modified.
117.Kleiman, “Fergana Canal,” 108.
118.Kleiman, 109.
119.Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 110.
1.Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 3.
2.Diana K. Davis uses the term “arboreal chauvinism” to refer to the long-standing Anglo-European belief that a temperate forest environment is the normative environment on earth. Diana K. Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 125.
3.On the concept of osvoenie (lit. “to make something one’s own,” svoi), see Widdis, New Land, 7–9.
4.A. G. Gael’, “Otbrosit’ nazad chernye peski Kara-Kuma,” Pravda, September 25, 1933. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. Turkmenistan was the last of the five Central Asian republics to be brought under full Soviet political control; only in early 1933, the year of the Moscow−Kara-Kum−Moscow rally, was the Turkmen leader of the “basmachi,” Dzhunaid Khan, driven from the Soviet Union.
5.USSR in Construction 2 (1934).
6.USSR in Construction 2: 84.
7.Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd, 214 − 215. This term is used by Gorky in his discussion of possible genres and topics for children’s literature. See Gor’kii, “O temakh.”
8.Elena Rozhentseva, “Opyt dokumentirovaniia Turkmenskikh poezdok A. P. Platonova,” in Arkhiv A. P. Platonova, ed. N. V. Kornienko (Moscow: IMLI-RAN, 2009), 1: 400.
9.Platonov sketches out the itinerary for his trips to Turkmenistan in letters and notebooks in a letter of April 1934, in Andrei Platonov, Gosudarstvennyi zhitel’ (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1988), 560.
10.Elena Antonova points out that Platonov left Turkmenistan on May 7, prior to the Academy of Sciences’ expedition. E. Antonova, “A. Platonov—Inzhener Tresta Rosmetroves,” in “Strana filosofov” Andreia Platonova: Problemy tvorchestva, ed. N. V. Kornienko (Moscow: IMLI-RAN, 2000), 4: 791. For a detailed reconstruction of the chronology of the Turkmenistan brigade, see Rozhentseva, “Opyt dokumentirovaniia,” 398–407.
11.Natal’ia Kornienko suggests that Platonov may have already traveled to the Kara-Kum Desert in the 1920s as a land reclamation engineer. Andrei Platonov, Zapisnye knizhki: Materialy k biografii, ed. Natal’ia Kornienko (Moscow: IMLI-RAN, 2000), 368n12.
12.L. Anninskii, for example, writes that for Platonov, Asia is generally “not a geographical space.” L. Anninskii, “Vostok i zapad v tvorchestve Andreia Platonova,” Prostor 1 (1968): 93. One recent analysis uniting geographical and metageographical topoi in Dzhan is Nariman Skakov, “Prostranstva ‘Dzhana’ Andreia Platonova,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 107, no. 1 (2011): 211–230. For a summary and catalog of mythological readings of Dzhan, see Thomas Seifrid, Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 186, 245–246.
13.Arif Dirlik, “Mao Zedong and ‘Chinese Marxism,’ ” in Marxism beyond Marxism, ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl (New York: Routledge, 1996), 128–129. One variation on this formulation (grounded in the same implicit biblical analogy) is Annette Michelson’s use of demotic Marxism, quoted in Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), 6. Jameson uses the term synonymously with vulgar Marxism, approving of it as the necessary practical counterpart to any theoretical Marxism, and while his definition does not stress local conditions, the emphasis on praxis has some relevance to Platonov’s case. Fredric Jameson, “Actually Existing Marxism,” in Marxism beyond Marxism, ed. Makdisi, Casarino, and Karl, 50.
14.Dirlik, “Mao Zedong,” in Marxism beyond Marxism, ed. Makdisi, Casarino, and Karl, 128–129.
15.Thomas Osbourne, “Utopia, Counter-Utopia,” History of the Human Sciences 16, no. 1 (February 2003): 123–136.
16.Platonov, “Bor’ba s pustynei,” in Sochineniia, 1, bk. 2: 276–278.
17.Platonov, “Zhizn’ do kontsa,” in Sochineniia, 1, bk. 2: 180.
18.Andrei Platonovich Platonov, Vzyskanie pogibshikh: Rasskazy i ocherki (Moscow: EKSMO, 2010), 630.
19.See M. Nemtsov and E. Antonova, “Gubmeliorator tov. Platonov: Po materialam Narkomata zemledeliia, 1921–1926 gg.,” in “Strana filosofov,” ed. Kornienko, 3: 476–508.
20.V. B. Shklovskii. Tret’ia fabrika (Moscow: Artel’ pisatelei “Krug,” 1926), 125.
21.Quoted in Andrei Platonov, Sobranie, eds. N. V. Kornienko and N. M. Malygina et al. (Moscow: Vremia, 2009), 1: 616.
22.Platonov, “Doklad upravleniia rabot po gidrifikatsii Tsentral’noi Asii,” Sochineniia, 1, bk. 1: 212–16. See also Boris Bobylev, “Ob Andree Platonove—Voronezhskom gazetchike,” in Nash Platonov, ed. R. V. Andreeva, Viktor Budakov, and L. Popova (Voronezh: Tsentr dukhovnogo vozrozhdeniia chernozemnogo kraia, 1999), 209.
23.Platonov, “Khlebstanok,” in Sochineniia, 1, bk. 2: 202.
24.Platonov, “Bor’ba s pustynei,” in Sochineniia, 1, bk. 2: 278.
25.Platonov, 276. Platonov similarly calls nature itself the “waste, excrement” of history. Andrei Platonov, “Simfoniia soznania II: Istoriia i priroda,” in “Strana filosofov,” ed. Kornienko, 1: 318.
26.Platonov, “Na fronte znoia,” in Sochineniia, 1, bk. 2: 212.
27.Platonov, 212.
28.Andrei Platonov, “Strana bedniakov: Ocherki chernozemnoi oblasti,” in Sobranie, 8: 633.
29.Platonov returns to the Solovevian pun, with more humor, in his “Story about Many Interesting Things” (1923): “Ivan thought about words: why is a ravine called a ravine? … A ravine [ovrag] is the enemy [vrag] of the peasant.” Platonov, “Rasskaz o mnogikh interesnykh veshchakh,” Sochineniia, 1, bk. 1: 244.
30.Platonov, “Khlebstanok,” in Sochineniia, 1, bk. 2: 202.
31.Bobylev, “Ob Andree Platonove,” in Nash Platonov, ed. Andreeva, Budakov, and Popova, 210. Dokuchaev attributed the 1891 famine to the breaking of the steppes’ virgin soil, noting that the fertile but delicate loess soil of the steppe lands became vulnerable to erosion when native grasses were cleared for grain cultivation.
32.Platonov, “Chernyi spasitel’,” in Sochineniia, 1, bk. 2: 156.
33.Andrei Platonov to M. A. Platonova, Tambov, 10 December 1926, in Arkhiv A. P. Platonova, ed. Kornienko, 1: 446.
34.Andrei Platonov, “Peschanaia uchitel’nitsa,” in Platonov, Rasskazy (Moscow: Khud. literatura, 1962), 37.
35.Pravda described the famous Black Sunday dust storm to its Soviet readers, reporting that “the air is filled with soil particles” and “farmers, cattlemen, and farm hands by the thousands are fleeing the affected areas.” “Pyl’nyi shtorm v S.Sh.A,” Pravda, April 14, 1935, 5.
36.The expansion to uncultivated land and its erosion in Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands campaign is discussed in the following chapter.
37.M. Il’in, New Russia’s Primer: The Story of the First Five-Year Plan, trans. George S. Counts and Nucia P. Lodge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 79.
38.Maksim Gor’kii, “O bor’be s prirodoi,” Pravda, December 12, 1931.
39.Platonov, “Pervyi Ivan,” 121. It is important to note that “Pervyi Ivan” was drawn from fragments of earlier texts and its characters present diverse views on drought and desertification. For a textological comparison of various manuscript versions and the published version in Oktiabr’, see Ben Dhooge, “Istochniki teksta ocherka ‘Pervyi Ivan’ (Zametki o tekhnicheskom tvorchestve trudiashchikhsia liudei),” in Arkhiv Platonova, ed. Kornienko, 1: 52–80.
40.Platonov, Zapisnye knizhki, 135.
41.Platonov, “O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii,” in Sobranie, 8: 641.
42.Platonov, 641.
43.Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature, trans. Clemens Dutt (London: Lawrence & Wishart,1940), 291–292.
44.Quoted in Weiner, Models of Nature, 195. Edith Clowes has shown Platonov’s close attention to contemporary debates in Marxist-Leninism in her discussion of dialectical materialism in The Foundation Pit. Edith Clowes, Fiction’s Overcoat: Russian Literary Culture and the Question of Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 235–257.
45.Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 292.
46.Platonov, “O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii,” in Sobranie, 8: 641.
47.A. Miretskii, “Segodnia i zavtra v Karakumskii pustyni,” Pravda, May 23, 1934. For background on the polar theme in socialist realism, see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 101–102; John McCannon, “Tabula Rasa in the North: The Soviet Arctic and Mythic Landscapes in Stalinist Popular Culture,” in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 241–260; and, on the socialist realist language of frontiers and exploration more generally, Widdis, New Land, 97–119. Also relevant is Clark’s treatment of the Stalinist “imperial sublime,” in Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 276–306.
48.Andrei Platonov, “Goriachaia Arktika,” Volga 9 (1975): 171.
49.Andrei Platonov, 171.
50.V. V. Bartol’d, “K voprosu o vpadenii Amu-dar’i v Kaspiiskoe more” (1932), in Sochineniia, ed. O. G. Bol’shakov (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), 248–251; Olaf Caroe, Soviet Empire: The Turks of Central Asia and Stalinism (London: Macmillan, 1967), 23.
51.Significantly, Platonov omits from discussion Chinggis Khan, whose invasion of Khorezm in the early thirteenth century was notoriously brutal and who was commonly associated with the destruction of irrigation systems in Islamic Central Asia and Iran.
52.Platonov, “Goriachaia Arktika,” 170.
53.Ehsan Yarshater, “Iran: iii. Traditional History,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2004), 13, fasc. 3: 303–306.
54.In his works on the multiethnic Turkmen SSR, Platonov discusses the nomadic ethnic Turkmens surprisingly infrequently and with some ambivalence.
55.Andrei Platonov, “Dzhan,” in Proza, 458.
56.Platonov, 502.
57.Platonov, “O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii,” in Sobranie, 8: 641.
58.Platonov, “Dzhan,” 484–485.
59.Platonov, 494.
60.Platonov, 461.
61.Platonov, 500.
62.Platonov, 472–473.
63.Platonov, 473.
64.Platonov, “Takyr,” in Aiding-Giunler: Al’manakh k desiatiletiiu Turkmenistana, 1924–1934, ed. Grigorii Sannikov (Moscow: Izd. Iubileinoi komissii TsIK TSSR, 1934), 51.
65.Platonov, “Dzhan,” 477.
66.Keith Livers remarks on a similar transformation of “filth” into “purity” in Moscow Chestnova’s body in Happy Moscow. Keith A. Livers, Constructing the Stalinist Body: Fictional Representations of Corporeality in the Stalinist 1930s (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 56. Another companion scene, but one that is more ambivalent, can be found in Platonov’s 1934 play Sharmanka (The Barrel Organ), in which a Soviet bureaucrat creates food from unlikely sources: Seifrid, Andrei Platonov, 179–181.
67.Eric Naiman, “Collective Toilet,” 98. For more on the problems of “waste” and “salvage” in Platonov’s works on Turkmenistan, see Natal’ia Kornienko, “Andrei Platonov: ‘Turkmeniia—Strana ironii,’ ” in Natsiia. Lichnost’. Literatura (Moscow: Nasledie, 1996), 108–109; Valerii Krapivin, “Iranskie grezy: Ariiskaia tema v tvorchestve Khlebnikova i Platonova,” in “Strana filosofov,” ed. Kornienko, 4: 301.
68.For more on Nikolai Fedorov’s influence on Platonov, see Ayleen Teskey, Platonov and Fyodorov: The Influence of Christian Philosophy on a Soviet Writer (Amsterdam: Avebury, 1982).
69.Platonov, “Goriachaia Arktika,” 172.
70.Andrei Platonov, “Bor’ba s pustynei,” in Sochineniia, 1, bk. 2: 276. In his notebooks Platonov sketches a rather darkly humorous plan for a story, marked by his own distinctive bathroom humor, combining all of these elements: “A story about two brothers—Maliuchenok—food, Chinese agriculture, a skull in the outhouse.” Platonov, Zapisnye knizhki, 177.
71.Platonov, “Voprosy sel’skokhoziastva v kitaiskom zemledelii,” in Sochineniia, 1, bk. 2: 236. While Platonov’s suggestion may have a hint of satire, it is consonant with Marx’s concept of social metabolism discussed in chapter 2.
72.Andrei Platonov, “Epifanskie shliuzy,” in Sobranie, 3: 101.
73.Platonov, 95, 118.
74.Paperny, “Men, Women, and the Living Space,” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design & Social History, ed. William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 168.
75.Andrei Platonov to M. A. Platonova, Tambov, January 5–6, 1927, in Arkhiv Platonova, ed. Kornienko, 1: 459.
76.Quoted in Natal’ia Kornienko, “Istoriia teksta i biografiia A. P. Platonova (1926–1946),” in Vladimir Fainberg, Zdes’ i teper’ 1 (1993), 218. In evoking pedagogy Platonov is referring to the claim that forced labor on the canals would re-educate political prisoners, discussed in the previous chapter.
77.Edward Allworth, ed., Central Asia, 130 Years of Russian Dominance: A Historical Overview (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 9, 13; P. A. Letunov, I. P. Gerasimov, and Viktor A. Kovda, Glavnyi Turkmenskii Kanal: Prirodnye usloviia i perspektivy orosheniia i obvodneniia zemel’ iuzhnykh raionov prikaspiiskoi ravniny zapadnoi Turkmenii, nizov’ev Amu-Dar’i i zapadnoi chasti pustyni Kara-Kumy (Moscow: Izd. Akademii nauk SSSR, 1952), 7.
78.A. Miretskii, “Segodnia i zavtra v Karakumskii pustyni,” 4. Decades-long construction of the Kara Kum Canal began in 1954. It is one of the major causes of the Aral Sea’s desiccation. See Nikolai S. Orlovsky, “Creeping Environmental Changes in the Karakum Canal’s Zone of Impact,” in Creeping Environmental Problems and Sustainable Development in the Aral Sea Basin, ed. Michael H. Glantz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 225–244.
79.Platonov, “Dzhan,” 452. “Bais,” in Central Asia, referred to the wealthy, and for Soviet readers, kulaks.
80.Platonov, 505.
81.Platonov, 476–477.
82.Ernest Gellner, Foreword to Nomads and the Outside World by Anatoly M. Khazanov, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), xi.
83.Gellner, x. Emphasis in original.
84.Platonov, “Goriachaia Arktika,” 170.
85.Platonov, 171. I am grateful to Alexander Nakhimovsky for a helpful discussion on Platonov’s meaning in this passage.
86.Platonov, 171. A takyr is a clayey, saline soil formation with limited vegetation found in ancient river deltas throughout Central Asia. Takyrs retain water because of their high clay content and are often used to water herd animals. Nikolai Kharin, Vegetation Degradation in Central Asia under the Impact of Human Activities (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002), 18.
87.Platonov, “Dzhan,” 490, 452.
88.Platonov, “Goriachaia Arktika,” 171.
89.Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 93.
90.Platonov, “O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii,” in Sobranie, 8: 641.
91.Svetlana Ponomareva, “ ‘Ia rodilsia na prekrasnoi zhivoi zemle… ’: Opyt kommentirovaniia meliorativnoi praktiki A. Platonova,” in “Strana filosofov,” ed. Kornienko, 4: 440.
92.Platonov, “Dzhan,” 465.
93.“Nazar” also connotes spiritual or mystical vision in Sufi tradition. Hamid Ismailov, “Dzhan as a Sufi Treatise,” Essays in Poetics 26 (2001): 72–82.
94.Platonov, “Dzhan,” 454.
95.Platonov, Zapisnye knizhki, 137.
96.I. A. Savkin, “Na storone Platona: Karsavin i Platonov, ili Ob odnoi ne-vstreche,” in Tvorchestvo Andreia Platonova: Issledovaniia i materialy, ed. E. I. Kolesnikova (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1995), 1:158–159. Savkin identifies the same nontraditional (i.e., “non-Platonic”) utopian landscapes in the works of the writer Lev Platonovich Karsavin, playing throughout the essay with the alternation between the names Platon, Platonov, and Platonovich.
97.Platonov, “Dzhan,” 457.
98.Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), 399–400.
99.Platonov, “Goriachaia Arktika,” 171.
100.Platonov, “Dzhan,” 467.
1.Vladimir Kharitonov and O. Fel’tsman, “Planeta tselina,” in Russkie sovetskie pesni (1917–1977), ed. N. Kriukov and Ia. Shvedov (Moscow: Khudozh. lit., 1977), 495. The name “tselina” was given to a number of space-related objects. For example, in 1967 the first radio surveillance satellite, Tselina, was released into space. In 1980 the asteroid Tselina was named in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Virgin Lands campaign.
2.Brezhnev, Tselina, 26.
3.For a history of the Russian colonization of the steppe, see Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
4.It was reported in 2016, for example, that the Russian Federation had created a “homesteading” initiative—the “Far East Hectare” program; officials noted that the Russian Far East possessed great reserves of “fertile soil” (plodorodnaia pochva) and the government was taking steps to support citizens “in the development of new lands” (v osvoenii novykh zemel’). “Programma ‘Dal’nevostochnyi gektar,” Agenstvo po razvitiiu chelovecheskogo kapitala na Dal’nem Vostoke i v Arktike, https://hcfe.ru/far-east-hectare/about/.
5.Nestor Korol, The So-called Virgin Lands of Kazakhstan (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Slavic Institute Papers, 1962), 6.
6.Gleb Tsipursky, “Citizenship, Deviance, And Identity: Soviet Youth Newspapers as Agents of Social Control in the Thaw-Era Leisure Campaign,” Cahiers du Monde russe 49, no. 4 (2008): 629–650; Juliane Fürst, “The Arrival of Spring? Changes and Continuities in Soviet Youth Culture and Policy between Stalin and Khrushchev,” in The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Polly Jones (New York: Routledge, 2006), 135–153; O. G. Gerasimova, “Ottepel’,” “zamorozki” i studenty Moskovskogo universiteta (Moscow: AIRO-XX vek, 2015). Tsipursky argues that the Virgin Lands campaign failed to transform Soviet youth into model citizens and that an alternative “leisure initiative” was launched in 1954 as a result. Tsipursky, “Citizenship, Deviance,” 636.
7.There is no comprehensive study of the literature of the Virgin Lands, either in Russian or English. Janet Kahwaty, “The Virgin Lands in Soviet Literature, 1954–1957” (MA thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1964) offers a preliminary bibliography and plot descriptions but limited analysis. For brief discussion of the genre of the sketch in Virgin Lands literature, see E. Zhurbina, Iskusstvo ocherka (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1957), 141–145.
8.As Eric Naiman observes, metadiscursivity was a feature of Stalinist discourse, although it persisted in later Soviet discourse. Naiman quotes Stalin: “Remember the latest slogans, which the Party has put forward lately in connection with the new class shifts in our country. I am speaking about slogans, such as the slogan of self-criticism, the slogan of heightened struggle with bureaucracy and the purge of the Soviet apparatus, the slogan of organization, etc.” Eric Naiman, introduction, in Landscape of Stalinism, ed. Dobrenko and Naiman, xii.
9.Vladislav Vasil’evich Vladimirov, ed., Prodolzhenie podviga: o “Tseline” i tselinnikakh (Moskva: Izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1979), 32.
10.Vladimirov, 42.
11.Vladimirov, 50, 84.
12.F. Morgun, ed., Na zemliakh tselinnykh: Rasskazy, ocherki, stikhi (Alma-Ata: Kazakhskoe gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khud. lit., 1955).
13.Evgeny Dobrenko, The Political Economy of Socialist Realism, trans. Jesse Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
14.Quoted in I. F. Sidorov and B. Ia. Dvoskin, Obzhitaia tselina (Moscow: Znanie, 1964), 3.
15.P. Kviatkovskii, “Tselina,” Leningradskaia smena, April 28, 1960, 1.
16.V. Kardin, “Tselina i knigi,” Novyi mir 1 (1956): 246.
17.Kardin, 253.
18.Quoted in Kardin, 247.
19.Clark, Soviet Novel, 73–77, 139–141, et passim.
20.Eleonory Gilburd, To See Paris and Die (Cambridge, MA: Harvard-Belknap Press, 2018), 110. See also Herman Ermolaev, Censorship in Soviet Literature 1917–1991 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 46–47, 93–94, 175–176.
21.V. Soloukhin, “Rozhdenie Zernograda,” in Na zemliakh tselinnykh, ed. Morgun, 94.
22.M. Balykin, “Vesennaia kolonna,” in Na zemliakh tselinnykh, ed. Morgun, 5.
23.Balykin, 21.
24.Balykin, 18.
25.A. Lemberg, “Pervenets,” in Na zemliakh tselinnykh, ed. Morgun, 65.
26.A. Shamkenov, “U kostra,” in Morgun, Na zemliakh tselinnykh, 47; Andreas Johns, Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 107.
27.A. Ryvlin, “O podvige,” in Na zemliakh tselinnykh, ed. Morgun, 57.
28.G. Avdeev, “Na zare,” in Na zemliakh tselinnykh, ed. Morgun, 45.
29.V. Gordienko, “V dal’nii put’,” 23; Gordienko, “Reke Ural,” 24, both in Na zemliakh tselinnykh, ed. Morgun.
30.Sidorov and Dvoskin, Obzhitaia tselina, 4.
31.Quoted in Kardin, “Tselina i knigi,” 245.
32.Sabit Mukanov, “Na vershine Taskabaka,” Novyi mir 10 (Oct. 1956): 15.
33.Soloukhin, “Rozhdenie Zernograda,” 96.
34.Sabit Mukanov, “Tvoi plody,” Literaturnaia gazeta (Dec. 12, 1958): 1.
35.V. Gordienko, “Tsvety Kremlia,” in Na zemliakh tselinnykh, ed. Morgun, 32.
36.Gordienko, 33.
37.Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 13.
38.Karl Marx, Capital, 1: 284–285, 287.
39.Martin McCauley, Khrushchev and the Development of Soviet Agriculture: Virgin Land Program, 1953–64 (London: Macmillan, 1976), 45–47. As an engineer, Malenkov believed that there were technical solutions to make farmland already under cultivation much more efficient.
40.Vladimir Soloukhin and Ivan Shukhov are both authors of books entitled Zolotoe dno.
41.Quoted in P. R. Pryde, Conservation in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 43.
42.Piers Blaikie, The Political Economy of Soil Erosion (London: Routledge, 1985), 34.
43.V. P. Vil’iams, Izbrannye sochineniia (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1950), 1: 141.
44.The Russian translation of the Kyrgyz story was published in Novyi mir 2 (1961): 54–74.
45.Chingiz Aitmatov, “Camel Eye,” in Mother Earth and Other Stories, trans. James Riordan (London: Faber, 1989), 206. All subsequent citations are from the English translation unless otherwise indicated.
46.Aitmatov, 198, 206.
47.Aitmatov, 207.
48.Aitmatov, 206.
49.Aitmatov, 220.
50.Aitmatov, 211.
51.Aitmatov, 212. Translation emended.
52.Aitmatov, 224.
53.Aitmatov, 216. Translation emended
54.Aitmatov, 216. Translation emended
55.Aitmatov, 218.
56.Aitmatov, 222.
57.“Hesiodic Works and Days,” trans. Gregory Nagy, Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University, https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/5290.
58.Hesiod, Works and Days, Theogony and the Shield of Heracles, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2006), 6.
59.Aitmatov, “Camel Eye,” 220.
60.Aitmatov, 201.
61.Aitmatov, 227.
62.Aitmatov, 227.
63.See Jane Costlow’s ecocritical reading of the film: “Parched: Water and Its Absence in the Films of Larisa Shepitko,” in Meanings and Values of Water in Russian Culture, ed. Jane Costlow and Arja Rosenholm (New York: Routledge, 2017), 209–216.
64.Aitmatov, “Camel Eye,” 213.
65.Breu, Insistence of the Material, 8.
66.See L. N. Mazur, “Zabytaia legenda: Khudozhestvennye fil’my ob osvoenii tseliny 1950–1970-x gg,” in Dokument. Arkhiv. Istoriia. Sovremennost’: Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii (Ekaterinburg: Izdatel’stvo Uralskogo universiteta, 2016).
67.Etiudy, kartiny s tseliny: Raboty sovetskikh khudozhnikov vesnoi i letom 1954 goda (Moscow: Izd-vo “Sovetskii khudozhnik,” 1955); see also Vern Grosvenor Swanson, Hidden Treasures: Russian and Soviet Impressionism, 1930s-1970s (Scottsdale, AZ: Fleischer Museum, 1994), 42–53.
68.Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 162.
69.Kaja Silverman, World Spectators (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 13.
70.Breu, Insistence of the Material, 187.
71.Paul Josephson calls the Virgin Lands campaign “one of Khrushchev’s most environmentally-devastating and costly programs.” Josephson, Environmental History, 145.
72.Marc Elie, “Desiccated Steppes: Droughts and Climate Change in the USSR, 1960s-1980s,” in Eurasian Environments, ed. Nicholas B. Breyfogle (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 2018), 75–93.
73.Michaela Pohl, “From White Grave to Tselinograd to Astana: The Virgin Lands Opening, Khrushchev’s Forgotten First Reform,” in The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s, ed. Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 293–294. See also Michaela Pohl, “The Virgin Lands between Memory and Forgetting: People and Transformation in the Soviet Union, 1954–1960” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1999).
74.Pohl, “White Grave,” 300.
75.Pohl, 300.
76.Magdalena Edyta Stawkowski, “Radioactive Knowledge: State Control of Scientific Information in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan” (PhD diss., University of Colorado, 2014), 74.
77.V. Orel, Planeta tselina: Studenchestvo na stroikakh Tselinnogo kraia (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1965), 1.
78.Orel, 1.
1.Leo Kraznozhon, “Black Market for Rich Black Earth,” KyivPost (November 9, 2011), https://www.kyivpost.com/article/opinion/op-ed/black-market-for-rich-black-earth-116610.html.
2.Marina Shepotilo, “Zberegti ukrains’ki chernozemi,” Ridne selo Ukraina (November 14, 2012): 4.
3.Dokuchaev, Russkii chernozem, 352.
4.For a review of the literature on this topic, see Eileen Eckmeier et al., “Pedogenesis of Chernozems in Central Europe—A Review,” Geoderma 139 (2007): 288–299. For a discussion of anthropogenic factors in the Moscow River floodplain, see A. L. Aleksandrovskii et al., “Natural and Anthropogenic Changes in the Soils and Environment of the Moskva River Floodplain in the Holocene: Pedogenic, Palynological, and Anthracological Evidences,” Eurasian Soil Science 51, no. 6 (2018): 613–627. This theory remains more controversial for Russian steppe chernozem than Central European chernozem.
5.Eckmeier, “Pedogenesis,” 295–296; Aleksandrovskii, “Natural and Anthropogenic Changes”; some Russian scholars critical of this model’s importation do not use the term “chernozem” for such Central European soils, preferring such circumlocutions as “black carbon Neolithic soils of anthropogenic origin.” E. G. Ershova et al., “Paleosols, Paleovegetation and Neolithic Occupation of the Moskva River Floodplain, Central Russia,” Quaternary International 324 (2014): 143.
6.Iu. P. Voronov, “Vozmozhno li, chto Ukrainskii chernozem sozdan liud’mi?,” Strana znanii, no. 2 (2018), https://www.krainaz.org/2018-02/355-chernozem.
7.Iu. A. Peskov, “Iskusstvennyi chernozem,” Sel’skaia zhizn’ (Oct. 21, 2019), https://www.sgazeta.ru/page7800286.html. Peskov asserts that we lack the soil resources to feed our growing population; he estimates that to feed seven billion people, we will need twice the 1.4 million hectares of exhausted soil that is currently available.
8.Russian soil science has been an area of special pride, thought of as a distinctly national science (otechestvennaia nauka).
9.Peskov, “Iskusstvennyi chernozem.”
10.Evgenii Kaziukin, “Zapredel’nyi uroven’ plodorodiia,” Belorus segodnia (April 12, 2011), https://www.sb.by/articles/zapredelnyy-uroven-plodorodiya.html.
11.Quoted in Kaziukin.
12.Asif Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974 (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2000), 58.
13.A. N. Bozhko and V. S. Gorodinskaia, God v “zvezdolete” (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1975), accessed online, http://www.astronaut.ru/bookcase/books/godvzv/text/08.htm.
14.Bozhko and Gorodinskaia.
15.Platonov, “O likvidatsii katastrof sel’skogo khoziaistva,” in Sochineniia, 1: 244.
16.Bathsheba Demuth returns to the theme of natural cycles and human time frequently in her history of the Bering Strait. Demuth, Floating Coast.
17.Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), 60.