The Origins of Russian Scenery: Volga River Tourism and Russian Landscape Aesthetics

Abstract

The essential idea of landscape, that a section of terrain can be appreciated as a visual or aesthetic object, is largely a phenomenon of modern history, tied to processes such as urbanization and the development of tourism. Although the appreciation of landscape in Russia was influenced by European aesthetics, Russia developed a unique approach to its own natural environment, and the Volga River played an important role in that process. When steamship tourism appeared on the Volga in the late nineteenth century, the river became a crucial location for the articulation of a new, scenic aesthetic. But this aesthetic competed with earlier views of Russian landscape, which held that the simple and unspectacular character of the native countryside contrasted favorably with the overly picturesque and inauthentic landscapes of western Europe. Images of the Volga that emerged in guidebooks, travelogues, and visual media took shape in attempts to negotiate between the touristic impulse to appreciate beautiful scenery and more established conceptions of Russian nature as appealing precisely in its lack of picturesqueness.

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