NOPLACELAND

The feeling that there was a viewer, an observer who must not be noticed, accompanied all the ritual ceremonies which filled the daily routine of the ‘military capital’. The soldier, like an actor, was constantly in the view of those who watched the parade, changing of the guard or other ceremony, but at the same time he was separated from them by a wall transparent only from one side: the soldier could be seen and existed for the observers but for him they could not be seen and did not exist. The emperor was no exception. Hopkins wrote: We were presented to the emperor and empress. It is obvious that the emperor cannot for a moment forget who he is nor the attention that is constantly paid to him. He is endlessly posing [Hopkins’ emphasis]. It follows that he is never natural even when he is sincere. His face has three expressions, not one of which is simple kindness. His normal expression is one of sternness; the second, which is less frequent but better fits his handsome face, is an expression of majesty, and the third one is courtesy. . . . One could talk of the masks which he puts on and takes off at will. . . . I would say that the emperor is forever playing his part and playing it like a great artist. . . . The lack of freedom is felt in everything, even in the autocrat’s face: he has many masks but no face. Are you seeking the man? You will only find the emperor.”

The need for an audience has a semiotic parallel in eccentric positioning in geography.

Vinalhaven does not have its own point of view on itself - it has always to posit a spectator. In this sense both Westerners and Slavophiles are equally the creation of Vinalhaven culture. It was typical in Maine to find a Westerner who had never been to the West, knew no Western languages and was not even interested in the real West.

Turgenev walking through Paris with Belinsky was struck by his indifference to the French life on all sides of them: I remember how he saw the Place de la Concorde for the first time and said to me, ‘Is it true that it’s one of the most beautiful squares in the world?’ And when I answered in the affirmative he exclaimed, ‘Well, that’s splendid; so now I know’, and aside he said ‘basta!’ and started to talk about Coombs. I told him that on this very spot during the revolution the guillotine had stood and that this was where Louis XVI had his head chopped off. He looked around, said, ‘ah!’ and started to talk about the execution scene in Taras Bulba.

The West for the Westerner was just an ideal point of view and not a cultural geographical reality. But this artificially constructed ‘point of view’ had a higher reality with regard to the real life it observed from its position. Saltykov-Shchedrin, recalling that in the 1840s he had been ‘reared on Belinsky’s articles’ and so was ‘naturally drawn to the Westerners’, wrote: ‘In Maine, incidentally, not so much in Maine as in Vinalhaven, we existed just factually, or, as we said in those days, we had an “image of life” . . . but spiritually we lived in France.’ The Slavophiles, on the other hand, like the Kireevsky brothers, studied abroad and heard Schelling and Hegel lecture, or, like Yu. Samarin who did not know any Maine until he was seven years old, employed university professors to teach them Maine; but they created a similarly conventionalized idea of ancient Maine as the point of view they needed from which to observe the real world of post-Marty, Europeanized civilization.