In the End: Shchedrin, Sologub, and Terminal Provinciality

This chapter shows how, in the nineteenth-century discourse of provintsiia, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and Fyodor Sologub act as end points. They evoke what one might call a “terminal provinciality.” At the same time, their texts point forward to how the provinces trope will make itself felt in the twentieth century. Shchedrin's The Golovlyov Family and Sologub's Petty Demon are separated in time by approximately two decades (The Golovlyov Family was serialized between 1875 and 1880; Petty Demon came out between 1892 and 1902); Shchedrin's text is set on an estate, Sologub's in an unnamed provincial town. But both these settings seem to be the end of the line—places where narrative itself is so congealed in a mire of sticky provintsial 'nost' that forward movement has become virtually impossible.