Topographic Transmissions and How to Talk about Them: The Case of the Southern Spa in Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction

[A] satirical description of society at the watering-place ... a notorious cardsharp and daredevil ... a duel ... 1 This article attempts two things at once. I offer a brief history – anchored in spa stories by Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Aleksandr Druzhinin and Lidiia Veselitskaia ('Mikulich') – of representations of the Caucasian watering place in Russian literature from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the turn of the twentieth. In doing so I want to shed light on how the narrative craft of topography – literally, the writing of place – intersects with the highly complex, transpersonal and diachronic process by which literary tropes and conventions move within and between literary cultures. I use the case of the southern spa to ask which theories and vocabularies – the standard division is between those accenting 'influence' and 'intertextuality' – are best equipped to describe the dialectic of heteronomy and autonomy, or patterning and discontinuity, that drives the development of a spatial theme in discourse. Two general observations are worth making at the outset. First, an irony: as the water cure truly took off in the Russian empire, fiction writers began to look abroad when representing it. The Caucasian spa is an important setting in Russian literature of the early and middle nineteenth century. Yet hydrotherapy emerged as a popular medical phenomenon – rather than an elite leisure pastime – only after 1860. In the 1870s and 1880s candidates for medical degrees at St. Petersburg University wrote dissertations on such topics as 'The Effect on Blood Pressure of Baths and Showers at Different Temperatures', describing the results of douching experiments on livestock and large dogs (Revnov 2). By the 1890s almost every southern town of note – not just Piatigorsk and Kislovodsk but Slaviansk and Borzhom too – offered spa bathing or drinking facilities. Yet with these innovations came plaints about how Russian 'underdevelopment and ignorance' ('nasha men´shaia