ABSTRACT
By opening his book Internal Colonization with a discussion of Nikolai Gogol's “surrealist” short story The Nose (1836), cultural historian Alexander Etkind was not simply hoping to achieve the literary impact so valued in contemporary humanistic studies. According to Etkind, “Gogol is an imperial author who belongs to the list of great colonial authors, along with James Joyce and Joseph Conrad,” as evidenced by his famous satirical work that encompassed the sweeping expanse between Riga, St. Petersburg, the Caucasus, and Kamchatka. 1 Etkind also notes that the story's fugitive nose was apprehended on its way to Riga without speculating why the mystical creature was trying to reach the center of the Livland province, a question that would be an entirely logical one and might provide insight into the nature of the Russian colonial mentality. So, why exactly did the nose of the story's unfortunate protagonist, Kovalev, decide to depart St. Petersburg for Riga, when it could have easily chosen Helsingfors (today, Helsinki), Reval (Tallinn), Warsaw, Viľna, Kiev, Odessa, Nizhny Novgorod, or Moscow? This study, which focuses on excursions, especially but not only school tours organized in the so-called Northwest Region of the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century, provides an answer to this question among others. I assert that group travel was not just an educational tool or form of recreation, it was also a cultural undertaking that helped define a specific political space and disseminate an imperial ideology in the imagination of Russia's subjects.
