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On Russian Soil: Myth and Materiality. By Mieka Erley. Ithaca: Northern Illinois University Press, distributed by Cornell University Press, 2021. xi, 204 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $39.95, hard bound.
This fascinating book examines Russian and Soviet literature through the lens of soil, providing an enlightening re-interpretation of Russian and Soviet identity and culture. The focus on soil allows Mieka Erley to interpret familiar authors and their works—Fedor Dostoevskii, Nikolai Chernyshevskii, Vissarion Belinskii, and many more—in new ways. At the same time, Erley shows the importance of soil as both a cultural construction and a material reality, drawing on approaches in environmental history that seek to understand non-human actors as agents asserting their own influences on human culture and material reality. Ultimately, the book shows that the drama of Russian and Soviet modernization—tensions between center and periphery, past and present, and town and country—cannot be fully understood without considering how Russians and Soviets conceptualized their relationship to the earth upon which they walked, plowed, flew, collectivized, starved, battled, loved, ate, and drove.
The book is divided into six chapters. It proceeds chronologically—based on the premise that soil has figured prominently in Russian and Soviet culture and politics—from the emancipation of the Russian serfs to the Virgin Lands campaign of the Khrushchev era. Chapter 1 sets the stage by analyzing the Russian adaptation of Johann Gottfried Herder's ideas that linked national identity to landscapes...