«Asia is revealing itself slowly but undoubtedly»: travelling on the Trans-Siberian railroad as a border experience in late Imperial Russia

The paper deals with discourses of mental mapping in Russia in the second half of the 19th century. The focus is on reports of Russian railway passengers who wrote down their impressions of the travelled territory in corresponding texts. The case study is based on travelogues documenting train journeys to the Eastern part of the Empire on the Transiberian railroad. The article scrutinizes the wide spread assumption that the construction and use of railroads in the 19th century contributed significantly to the integration of nation-states and empires in the sense of their “territorialisation” (Charles Maier). Using the example of the Russian Empire, it argues that the construction and use of the new means of transportation had both integrative and dis-intergrative effects in terms of the representation of the imperial space on the mental maps of Russian travellers. The spatial experience of an integrated transportation system evoked on the one side notions of Russia as a large, indivisible whole. At the same time the railroad created completely new opportunities to personally experience the cultural frontiers within the multi-ethnic Empire. This promoted both the pride felt in the size of the Russian Empire but also tendencies of estrangement and fears about the “Other” in one’s own country.