Mapping Russia, but Finding Some Blind Spots

The subject of space has long been a focal point of Russian culture.In the nineteenth century, some historians saw the unbounded space of Muscovy and Russia as a reason for the development of autocracy, while federalist historians argued that it meant that regions should have more of a say in the government. 1 In the twentieth century, a flurry of attempts to politically reimagine Russia during the civil war (1918-22) were defeated politically and the Bolsheviks, particularly Nadezhda Krupskaya, shaped the creation of a new local history (kraevedenie) as a decidedly apolitical alternative. 2 In the past twenty years, there has been a resurgence of interest in the role of space in Russian history. 3 Edith Clowes's rich but frustrating book sets out to show how ideas of place in what was the Russian Empire changed between 1914 and 1922, a period encompassing Russia's disastrous experiences in World War One and its civil war.There is a shift in the framing of the book, though, from focusing on a national view of space throughout the body of the book to an imperial one in the conclusion.As a result, the book lacks a certain cohesion that further revision would have lent it.The book's extensive use of digital humanities principles makes it methodologically important.As Clowes notes, the book "is part companion to the literary war and revolution website MAPRR, part excursus on the possibilities of performing larger-scale literary research using digital-humanist methods, and part teaching tool" (p.217).This greatly increases the number of literary works from the period that she can analyze in the aggregate.This richness in primary sources is, unfortunately, not matched in the selection of secondary sources.One of the goals of the work is to bring in a wider range of literary sources, such as poetry, prose, and memoir, in order to generate a spatial image that Clowes calls a "place-based concept" (p.18).This intriguing approach to the sources generates complex mapping of ideas and connections between authors, which can be seen in full on the website mentioned above, but unfortunately, images shown in the book are often illegible due to their size. 4 Large swathes of historical literature are absent,