That trains brought to Russia

Railways, like vessels, penetrated the body of our country, weaved into mentality and life, into the culture of everyday life of Russia. So much so that they have always been. Nevertheless, their active construction began in Russia only in the second half of the 19th century. Recently in the Moscow Library. Dostoevsky presented a monograph by the German author of Fridtiof Benjamin Shenka “A train to modernity. Mobility and social space of Russia in the age of railways ”(Publishing House" UFO ").

Train to modernity

The study of Shenka, published with the support of the German Historical Institute, shows how the space of the Russian Empire with the emergence of railways has changed, what historical events preceded and which became possible thanks to him. We make a reservation right away: the fact of such a large -scale construction was significant. But not only. With the advent of railways, a huge and motley, previously relatively settled agrarian country came into motion.

Society and power, economics and the army were affected by irreversible changes. Emperors were able to appear in those deaf corners of the country where there were never before, subjects - to see them, and revolutionaries - to organize bloody terrorist acts on the railway. “ In the 1860s and 1870s, Russia was already experiencing the first, and in the 1890s-the second period of the boom in the construction of railways. At the turn of the century, the country had the second largest network of rail roads in the world after the United States , ”the author of the monograph notes.

According to the concept that is generally accepted to this day, the construction of “cast iron”, as was called at the end of the 19th - early 20th centuries, was an extremely progressive act that worked for the unification of the country. In his work, Benjamin Shenk puts this position to critical analysis, paying attention to the ambivalence of the cultural modern era. He fundamentally does not see Russia at the beginning of the 20th century by a backward country, considering it primarily from the point of view of spatial sociology.

The historian observes the space not as a decoration against which events are played out, but as a result of complex social processes. He proceeds from the provisions of the German scientist Dietrich Schulz and is guided by his quote: " Spaces do not exist on their own, they are produced ."

Benjamin is primarily interested in the configuration of fundamentally new social spaces. Such as a train compartment or the location of the premises inside the stations.

The first chapter of the book is devoted to the analysis of ideas about the space of railways in the Russian railway discourse. The author worries what kind of ideas about the space of Russia transport designers, economists and military developed during the debate about what railways should be.

The second chapter describes changes in landscapes and landscape images that arose as a result of construction. The representation of a new road space in such genres as a guide, a roadmap, and a railway schedule is analyzed.

The third part describes a change in spatial perception in the age of acceleration and increased geographical mobility. It speaks of specific social groups that use the advantages of existing in the age of accelerated new mobility, and about a change in the perception of Western provinces and Siberia in the second pool of the 19th century. In the fourth chapter, the railway is considered both as the space of war and revolution, for which rebels and revolutionaries are fighting, and as a bridgehead for modern wars.

In the preparation of the book, Benjamin Shenk used interesting sources that have not previously attracted scientists. These are documents of the Imperial Russian Technical Society, complaints of passengers, archives of the Ministry of Railways, daily protocols of officials of railway gendarmerie, guides for trains passengers. He writes about how the unification of the gigantic spaces of the Russian Empire through railways influenced the mental integration of society, as the personal impressions of travelers from the country's length were associated with a strictly planned and regulated uniformly functioning space of railways.

As it turned out, not all traveling experienced exceptional pride in the greatness of the country, many experienced alienation, rejection of mental and cultural differences and borders that were encountered during the trip. What to say there: Lev Tolstoy himself hated the railways, publicly criticized their construction in the 1860s. Ironically, he died on November 7, 1910 in the house of the head of the small railway station Astapovo.

“ In the novel“ Anna Karenina, ” writes Shenk,“ whose main character ends with suicide by jumping under the coming composition, Tolstoy emphasizes, among other things, the destructive power of modern means of transportation. ” The social consequences of the construction of railways also clearly or hiddenly critically wrote Fedor Dostoevsky, Ivan Bunin, Nikolai Leskov, Anton Chekhov. However, this trend cannot be called unequivocal - Dostoevsky, for example, in the "Writer Diary" subsequently enthusiastically responds about this means of message as a tool for the mission of civilization in Asia.

Representatives of the authorities also treated trains differently: Alexander II more actively used railways to demonstrate power than the last two emperors-Alexander III and Nicholas II. A paradoxical situation has developed: the active development of the country's enormous spaces led not to reduce the spatial distance between the monarch and the people, but to its increase.

This phenomenon was associated with new sources of danger to the king’s life in the era of technical modernity. Such as terrorist attacks and train crashes. It is significant that on October 17, 1905, Nicholas II signed the so -called October manifesto, on the same day, recording a prayer request to take away trouble from the Russian Empire in the diary, referring to the railway catastrophe, in which Alexander III miraculously survived several decades ago on the same calendar day with his family.

At the same time, visioners painted blessed paintings, from which it followed that the railway must certainly civilize people, almost turning them all into first -class passengers. Nevertheless, the railways, bringing orderliness to the province, at the same time contributed to chaos in the center of the country.

The difficulties of translation

However, it is necessary to distract from the content of the book and pay attention to its presentation in the library. Dostoevsky. The book was published in 2014 in German and only now - in Russian.

The translator and scientific editor was Maya Lavrinovich. As she told at the presentation, it was not easy to translate the text: “The text is full of technical terms and the most difficult ideological ups and downs, which are not always easy to figure out. Therefore, the fact that Benjamin shared with me responsibility for the translation, having read his every word and every sentence, makes his Russian text much more reliable than he could be. ”

The work was not mechanical, since it demanded an immersion of thoughts and logic of the author, and as a result, even the translator had to change his ideas about the culture of the everyday life of the Russian Empire. Example: The time difference between Moscow and St. Petersburg in the last century was 29 minutes. And it was possible to use the train schedule only by coming in advance to the station and putting your watch in accordance with the station. The Studia Europea series editor Denis Zamvizhkov, who oversaw the release of the book, mentioned the image of the red wheel near Solzhenitsyn, of the ambiguity of this image, the connection with the image of the Gogolevsky Brick wheel, over which the men scratched his head: “Will this wheel reach Kazan or not reach Kazan?” According to Denis, it arrived, and not only to Kazan. The very space of railways is studied in a book from a purely social point of view - wagons, coupe, and stations. This space was called up, as later than the Stalin Metro, to become a forerunner of the new Russia. But it became a forerunner of upcoming cataclysms.

The memoirists of 1917 wrote about the signs of a catastrophe, including about the dirty stations and trains spat on seeds.

According to the historian Leonid Horizonov (HSE), the key concepts of the book are time and space. And if with the concept of time, historians usually have everything in order, then not everyone is adequately in contact with space. To comprehend the observed topic, it was a spatial turn. After all, undoubtedly, for Russia, the road is an eternal theme affected by many classics of literature and is now not fully exhausted.

The historian noted: the economic aspect is present in the work of Benjamin Shenka, but is by no means a dominant. Even at the time of debates about the construction of railways in Russia, various, sometimes bizarre opinions were broadcast, such as the fact that at such speeds people will go crazy. But there were also economic justifications of criticism of the project. Indeed, earlier the main channel of the transportation of people were river arteries, and they simultaneously served as the main mental canal in the history of Russia.

The railways were artificially created for some two or three generations, which produced a cultural shock, which was also observed in early Soviet times. Thus, the poem of Sergei Yesenin is known, in which he contrasts the train of the running foal and hardly convinces himself of the need for progress. In this regard, the iconic phrases “Locomotive of history”, “Echelon of history” are also not accidental.

The expansion of the bottom into the center of the Empire caused a part of society not a feeling of success, but, on the contrary, a sense of anxiety, danger, Alarmist sentiments. And it is precisely because of this that various travel tariffs were introduced, designed to create the greatest comfort for the center, on the one hand, and contributing to social stratification, on the other.

Like a metro in Moscow

The categories of space and time in connection with railways and collective memory can be discussed for a long time. But today's reality forced the author to ask the author a more pragmatic question:

“This meeting has been talked about the formation of the era of modern and industrialization, the unification of spaces in connection with the construction of railways, about the image of the Red Wheel. Now we live in the postmodern era when many people use other modes of transport. At the same time, the construction of railways in the country is actively continuing. In 2017, the Amuro-Yakut railway highway will be completed, and the construction of the Magadan highway included in the “Strategy for the Development of Railway Transport in Russia until 2030”. Could you give a cultural analysis of this phenomenon, maybe some kind of forecast? ”

“Now the railways are not being built for passengers, it seems to me. Since there are other opportunities to overcome space. They are built primarily for goods. And it is very reasonable. And this is quite historical, because already at the end of the 19th century the government tried to attract commodity flows from Asia and Europe through Russia, in some way it was successful. And now the Russian government is trying to attract some kind of flow of goods through the railway. If the railway will work like a metro in Moscow, then success will definitely be, ” answered Benjamin Shenk.

Maria Popova