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This Land Is Your Land: Andrei Bitov Travels Through The Caucasus, José Vergara
This Land Is Your Land: Andrei Bitov Travels Through The Caucasus, José Vergara
Russian Faculty Research and Scholarship
The present article examines Andrei Bitov’s Lessons of Armenia (Uroki Аrmenii) and A Georgian Album (Gruzinskii al’bom) as examples of subversive late-Soviet travel writing. While some scholars have noted imperialist tendencies in the two travelogues, I argue that Bitov effectively challenges the colonial perspective. Besides considering the Soviet state’s push for travel writing and tourism while Bitov was writing his texts, the article uses Mary Louise Pratt’s deconstruction of colonialist travel writing as a theoretical framework. Adapting and extending her work, I examine how Bitov consistently deploys and subverts three key devices: mastery of the seen/scene, …