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LITERATURES, CULTURES, AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Energy Culture
Work, Power, and Waste
in Russia and the Soviet Union
Edited by
Jillian Porter
Maya Vinokour
Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment
Series Editors
Ursula K. Heise
Department of English
University of California
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Gisela Heffes
Rice University
Houston, TX, USA
Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment focuses on new research in the
Environmental Humanities, particularly work with a rhetorical or literary
dimension. Books in this series explore how ideas of nature and environ-
mental concerns are expressed in different cultural contexts and at differ-
ent historical moments. They investigate how cultural assumptions and
practices, as well as social structures and institutions, shape conceptions of
nature, the natural, species boundaries, uses of plants, animals and natural
resources, the human body in its environmental dimensions, environmen-
tal health and illness, and relations between nature and technology. In
turn, the series makes visible how concepts of nature and forms of envi-
ronmentalist thought and representation arise from the confluence of a
community's ecological and social conditions with its cultural assump-
tions, perceptions, and institutions.
Jillian Porter • Maya Vinokour
Editors
Energy Culture
Work, Power, and Waste in Russia and the
Soviet Union
Editors
Jillian Porter Maya Vinokour
University of Colorado Boulder New York University
Boulder, CO, USA New York, NY, USA
Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment

ISBN 978-3-031-14319-9 ISBN 978-3-031-14320-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14320-5
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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Acknowledgements
This volume grew out of a colloquium called “Energy Aesthetics: Force,

Flow, and Entropy,” funded by the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study
of Russia at New York University. The editors express their appreciation to
the Jordan Center and all participants of the colloquium, including those
who did not submit work for inclusion in this collection: Anindita Banerjee,
Anya Bernstein, Alec Brookes, Jane Costlow, Mieka Erley, Isabel Lane,
and Anson Rabinbach.
Like so many others, we grieve the untimely passing of our brilliant col-
league, Robert Bird (1969–2020), who revised an essay previously pub-
lished in The Slavic Review for this volume. We are grateful to Christina
Kiaer, Sasha Artamonova, Alla Roylance, and Molly Brunson for help and
guidance as we sought illustrations for his essay.
While completing her portion of the work on this volume, Jillian Porter
was supported by a George F. Kennan Membership at the Institute for
Advanced Study and a Faculty Fellowship at the Center for Humanities
and the Arts at CU Boulder.
v
Contents
1 Introduction:
Energy Culture in Russia and the Soviet
Union 1
Jillian Porter and Maya Vinokour
2 The
Energy of Chernyshevsky’s Vera Pavlovna in the
Modern Cultural Economy 21
Konstantine Klioutchkine
3 T
he Energy Trap: Anna Karenina as a Parable for the
Twenty-First Century 41
Jillian Porter
4 Picturing
Coal in the Donbas: Nikolai Kasatkin and the
Energy of Late Realism 65
Molly Brunson
5 Polar
Fantasies: Valery Bryusov and the Russian
Symbolist Electric Aesthetic 87
Polina Dimova
6 Energetic
Liquids in Pre-Revolutionary Russian
Utopianism113
Maya Vinokour
vii
viii Contents
7 Revolutionary
Burnout and the Rise of the Soviet
Rest Regime143
William Nickell
8 The
Mechanics and Energetics of Soviet Communism:
The Poetics of Peat163
Robert Bird
9 Leonid
Brezhnev and the Elixir of Life195
Joy Neumeyer
10 Russian
Oil: Tragic Past, Radiant Future, and the
Resurrection of the Dead225
Ilya Kalinin
11 Of
Mice and Degenerators: Post-progress Energy and
Posthuman Bodies in Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx249
Meghan Vicks
12 Hydrocarbons
on Hold: Energy Aesthetics of Teriberka
in the Russian Arctic273
Jessica K. Graybill, Yang Zhang, and Isobel Hooker
13 A
fterword on Chernobyl (2019): A Soviet Propaganda
Win Delivered 33 Years Late297
Kate Brown
Index305
Notes on Contributors
Robert Bird was Professor of Slavic and Cinema and Media Studies at
the University of Chicago; the author of numerous publications including
Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (2008; his own Russian translation
2021), Fyodor Dostoevsky (2012), The Russian Prospero: The Creative
Universe of Viacheslav Ivanov (2006), and the forthcoming Soul Machine:
Soviet Film Models Socialism; and editor and curator of Revolution Every
Day: A Calendar (2017).
Kate Brown is Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History
of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author
of several prize-winning histories, including Plutopia: Nuclear Families,
Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters
(2013). Her latest book, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the
Future (2019), translated into nine languages, was a finalist for the 2020
National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pushkin House Award, and the
Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage.
Molly Brunson is Associate Professor of Russian Literature and the
History of Art at Yale University. She writes and teaches broadly on the
literature and art of Russia’s long nineteenth century. Her first book,
Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840–1890, won the award for
Best Book in Cultural Studies from the American Association of Teachers
of Slavic and East European Languages in 2017. Brunson is working on a
second book, The Russian Point of View: Perspective and the Birth of
Modern Russian Culture.
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Polina Dimova is Assistant Professor of Russian Language, Literature,

and Culture at the University of Denver. Her research focuses on Russian,
German, and British literature, music, and visual art. Her forthcoming
book, At the Crossroads of the Senses, examines how Modernist multimedia
experiments stemmed from a fascination with synesthesia, the figurative,
or neurological mixing of the senses. Dimova’s work has been supported
by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the National
Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and Mellon grants. She has pub-
lished on electricity in Russian culture; on the Symbolist, Soviet, and post-
Soviet literary interpretations of the myth and music of the Russian
composer Alexander Scriabin; on Sergei Prokofiev’s early ballets and
songs; and on Oscar Wilde’s and Richard Strauss’s adaptations of the
Salome legend.
Jessica Graybill is Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Colgate
University. She researches the climate-energy-community nexus in the
Arctic and sub-Arctic. Graybill is a recipient of American Council for
Learned Societies and Fulbright fellowships and multiple grants from the
National Science Foundation, all awarded for research related to resource
extraction, climate change, and community resilience in Russia and the
Arctic. She is past president of the Russian, Central Eurasian, and East
European Specialty Group and the Polar Geography Specialty Group of
the American Association of Geographers and is the editor-in-chief of the
Polar Geography journal.
Isobel Hooker is an MA student at The Ohio State University studying
human geography, material culture, and visual culture. They are the recipi-
ent of the ENGIE-Axium Graduate Fellowship and have focused much of
their studies on matters of sustainability and environmental issues within
their geographic area of interest: the Northwestern portion of the Russian
Arctic. Hooker’s interests include ecotourism, historical and commercial
depictions of arctic spaces, reindeer husbandry, and climate change.
Hooker’s MA thesis research will examine the visual language of ecotour-
ism on the Kola Peninsula, and they hope to study this industry and its
connections to border security, as well as cultural adaptations that have
resulted from a rapidly melting arctic.
Ilya Kalinin is a senior fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and a
visiting research scholar at Princeton University’s Institute for International
and Regional Studies (PIIRS). His research focuses on Russian literature,
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
early Soviet intellectual and cultural history, and historical and cultural
politics in contemporary Russia. He has published in a wide range of jour-
nals, including Ab Imperio, Arche, Baltic Worlds, Osteuropa, Die Welt der
Slaven, Sign Systems Studies, Social Sciences, Russian Literature, Russian
Studies, Russian Studies in Literature, Russian Studies in Philosophy,
Slavonica, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, New Literary Observer, and
Logos. His essays have been translated into 14 languages. His book History
as the Art of Articulation: Russian Formalists and Revolution is forthcom-
ing from the New Literary Observer Publishing House (Moscow).
Konstantine Klioutchkine is Associate Professor of Russian at Pomona
College in Claremont, California. He works in the fields of cultural history
and media studies. As part of these interests, he has published articles on
Nikolai Karamzin, Nikolai Nekrasov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov,
and Vasily Rozanov.
Joy Neumeyer is a journalist and historian of Russia and Eastern Europe.
She holds a PhD in History (2020) from UC Berkeley and held a postdoc-
toral fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence. Her
publications include “Late Socialism as a Time of Weeping: The Life,
Death, and Resurrection of Vladimir Vysotskii” (Kritika, summer 2021)
and “Darkness at Noon: On History, Narrative, and Domestic Violence”
(American Historical Review, June 2021). Her writing on Russia and
Eastern Europe has appeared in publications including The New York
Times, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and The Nation.
William Nickell is a cultural historian and Associate Professor of Russian
literature at the University of Chicago. His forthcoming book, The Soviet
Cure, considers problems of medical subjectivity and medical aesthetics,
asking how people in the USSR formed their beliefs in the efficacy of
socialized medicine. The book considers how medical authority is shaped
not only by diagnostic and curative practice but also by narratives of health
and disease and by the patient’s aesthetic experience of healthcare in all its
dimensions.
Jillian Porter is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and
Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Colorado Boulder.
She is the author of Economies of Feeling: Russian Literature Under
Nicholas I and has published essays on money, commodities, and the
queue in Russian and Soviet literature and cinema.
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Meghan Vicks is the author of Narratives of Nothing in Twentieth-

Century Literature and numerous essays on modern and contemporary
literature. She teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Maya Vinokour is Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and
Slavic Studies at New York University. She studies Stalinist labor culture,
late-Soviet science fiction, and post-Soviet media.
Yang Zhang is an MPhil student at Oxford University reading
International Relations. Her academic interests include energy and cli-
mate change, international political economy, and international order.
Yang’s MPhil research focuses on how the expectation of future energy
trade shapes German foreign policies towards Russia. Yang is involved in
Agora Oxford, a grassroots foreign policy think tank, and Monterey
Trialogue Initiative, a fellowship program promoting innovative, effective,
and inclusive policy-making among Russian, Chinese, and western
scholars.
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Alexandre Michon, “Oil Fountain of the Gorny

Cooperative, Struck in September of 1887 (Balkhany
near Baku).” From the entry for “Oil” (“Neft’”) in
Brockhaus and Efron’s Encyclopedic Dictionary,
1891–19076
Fig. 4.1 Aleksei Ivanitzky, La ville d’ Alexandrofsk-Grouchefsky,
between 1875 and 1914. (Muséum national d’
histoire naturelle, Direction des bibliothèques et de la
documentation, Paris) 73
Fig. 4.2 Nikolai Kasatkin, photograph of a coal hauler, n.d.
Photograph, 11.5 × 17 cm. (N. A. Yaroshenko
Memorial Museum-Estate, Kislovodsk) 79
Fig. 8.1 The Extraction of Peat by Hand (Dobyvanie torfa
ruchnym sposobom), ca. 1919. (The Hoover
Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at
Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA) 165
Fig. 8.2 Still from Lev Kuleshov, Engineer Prait’s
Project (Proekt inzhenera Praita), 1918 171
Fig. 8.3 Still from A. Litvinov, For the Six Million! (Za shest’
millionov!), 1931 172
Fig. 8.4 Still from A. Litvinov, For the Six Million!173
Fig. 8.5 Arkadii Sergeevich Stavrovskii, Careful with the
Shovel (Ostorozhno s lopoatoi), Moscow-Leningrad,
1931177
Fig. 8.6 Vasilii Vasilevich Surianinov, Don’t Walk on Faulty
Bridges (Ne khodi po neispravnym mostkam),
Moscow, 1938 178
xiii
xiv List of Figures
Fig. 8.7 Cover image of E. Shabad, USSR: North, East, South,

West (SSSR: Sever, vostok, iug, zapad), 1932. (Hanna
Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center at
the University of Chicago Library, Chicago, IL) 181
Fig. 8.8 A. Depal’do, Hydro-Peat (Gidrotorf, detail), 1937.
(Oil on canvas) 184
Fig. 9.1 Still from Leonid Brezhnev’s televised Soviet New
Year’s Address, January 1, 1979 196
Figs. 10.1–10.4 Stills from Andron Konchalovsky’s Siberiade (1978) 242
Fig. 12.1 Aestheticization of the hydrocarbon industry in
Soviet propaganda. (V. Yelkin, “The More Oil, the
Stronger Our Motherland!,” 1946) 277
Fig. 12.2 Regional map indicating Teriberka as the onshore site
of an LNG processing center for gas extracted from
the offshore Shtokman fields. (Source: shtokman.ru.
Accessed at https://arcticportal.org/ap-library/
news/476- shtokman-decision-in-december) 282
Fig. 12.3 Abandoned building in Teriberka with the local
House of Culture in the background, 2019.
(Photo by Isobel Hooker) 285
Fig. 12.4 Teriberka: New Life Festival 2019. (Photo by Yang
Zhang)291
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Energy Culture in Russia

and the Soviet Union
Jillian Porter and Maya Vinokour
Climate change is transforming humanity’s relationship with energy. Even

if we have not yet reached the “point of no return,” the dominant theme
in contemporary discussions of energy is crisis.1 We are haunted by the
specters of energy scarcity and waste—or worse, accidental, catastrophic
release, as in the nuclear disasters of Chornobyl and Fukushima or the oil
1
According to a 2019 report published in the Yale Environment Review, scientists from
Oxford and Utrecht define “the Point of No Return” as “the year after which even aggressive
policy measures would be unlikely to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal by the end of the
century.” The study in question appeared in the European Geosciences Union’s Earth
Systems Dynamics journal in Spring 2018 under the title “The point of no return for climate
action: effects of climate uncertainty and risk tolerance.”
J. Porter
University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA
e-mail: jillian.porter@colorado.edu
M. Vinokour (*)
New York University, New York, NY, USA
e-mail: mvv221@nyu.edu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
J. Porter, M. Vinokour (eds.), Energy Culture, Literatures,
Cultures, and the Environment,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14320-5_1
2 J. PORTER AND M. VINOKOUR
spills of the Persian Gulf War and BP’s Deepwater Horizon.2 The latest
scientific consensus is grim: human extraction of industrial and biological
energy from fossil fuels and animal-based foods is disrupting the Earth’s
ecological balance at a terrifying rate. Rapid environmental depletion ben-
efits the wealthy few while subjecting marginalized populations to dispro-
portionate climate violence and placing numerous non-human species
in peril.
Even as governments, NGOs, and scientists urge us to act on behalf of
life itself, our personal energy is commodified as a limited resource. With
the popularization of the “life hack,” our mental, emotional, and physical
resources have become subject to self- or employer-imposed technologies
that claim to “optimize” our vital forces. Popular media outlets advise us
to eliminate “energy vampires” from our social circles and to “recharge”
and “reset” our minds, the better to maintain the integrity of what Dr.
Strangelove’s General Jack Ripper called our “precious bodily fluids.”3 At
the same time, corporations exhort us to combat climate change individu-
ally through round-the-clock eco-shopping. So dire is the situation, we are
told, that only a truly universal effort can forestall disaster. Add to cart.
Purchase now.
The pressing nowness of contemporary energy discourse makes it easy
to forget how critical this topic has felt, and how variously it has been
conceived, throughout the modern era. The phlogiston-obsessed chemist
of circa 1800, the early-twentieth-century quantum physicist, and the
neoliberal champion of “human capital” all imagined energy outside the
framework of disaster. Somewhat closer to our present sensibilities were
the Victorians, whose confidence in energy’s seemingly boundless poten-
tial for spurring progress was tempered by fossilized evidence of past over-
consumption and theoretical proof of eventual entropic heat death.4 Yet if
the Victorians considered the possibility that humans might someday
exhaust Earth’s resources, they did not foresee that efforts to furnish
2
When it comes to energy use and its environmental consequences, human beings are not
universally responsible or affected. In using terms like “we” and “us” when discussing con-
temporary energy consciousness, the editors have likely readers of this volume in mind.
3
For a discussion of energetic themes in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), including the
references to “precious bodily fluids,” see Jerome Franklin Shapiro, Atomic Bomb Cinema:
The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film (New York: Routledge, 2001), 165.
4
W. J. Thomas Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon
(Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), 210; Gillian Beer, “The Death of the Sun: Victorian Solar
Physics and Futures,” Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford, 1999), 219–41.
1 INTRODUCTION: ENERGY CULTURE IN RUSSIA AND THE SOVIET UNION 3
t echnologically advanced nations with ever more energy would jeopardize

life on the planet even before supplies ran out.
As the time scale for confronting climate crisis contracts, scholarly
engagement with the long history of energy gains new urgency. This his-
tory has garnered intense interest within the humanities, especially in the
history of science, technology, and the environment; English; and com-
parative literature.5 As one of the world’s leading fossil-fuel producers and
a historical site of energy-based utopian imaginings, Russia invites explora-
tion of energy as a political resource, a philosophical concept, and a sub-
ject of cultural representation. Recent scholarship has considered
contemporary energy politics and the history of energy production in
Russia and the Soviet Union, but the subject of energy as a cultural con-
struct remains understudied—a problematic omission given the centrality
of literature and other aesthetic forms to Russian and Soviet history.6
Isolated investigations of energy in Russian or Soviet culture have dem-
onstrated the importance of this line of inquiry for understanding the
5
See, for instance, Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History (MIT, 2017); Cara New
Daggett, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke
Univ. Press, 2019); Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History (New York, NY: Simon &
Schuster, 2019); Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical
Thermodynamics (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Barri J. Gold,
ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2010); Lynn M. Voskuil, ed., Nineteenth-Century Energies: Literature, Technology, Culture
(New York: Routledge, 2016); Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer eds., Energy Humanities:
An Anthology (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2017); and Matúš Mišík and
Nada Kujundžić, eds., Energy Humanities: Current State and Future Directions
(Springer, 2021).
6
A selection of relevant recent volumes on Russian energy politics and history includes:
Thane Gustafson, Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia (Belknap Press of
Harvard Univ. Press, 2012); Per Högselius, Red Gas: Russia and the Origins of European
Energy Dependence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Agnia Grigas, The Politics of Energy and
Memory between the Baltic States and Russia (Routledge, 2013); Ryan C. Maness and
Brandon Valeriano, eds., Russia’s Coercive Diplomacy: Energy, Cyber, and Maritime Policy as
New Sources of Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Matthew Sussex and Roger E. Kanet, eds.,
Russia, Eurasia and the New Geopolitics of Energy: Confrontation and Consolidation (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015); Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen, The Energy of Russia: Hydrocarbon Culture and
Climate Change (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019); Gustafson, The Bridge: Natural Gas in a
Divided Europe (Harvard Univ. Press, 2020); and Margarita Balmaceda, Russian Energy
Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union
(Columbia Univ. Press, 2021).
close relationships among culture, politics, and the environment.7

Compelling work in this area has appeared under the broader rubric of
environmental humanities, a growing subfield that offers valuable insights
into energy culture—even when energy itself is not a key term under dis-
cussion.8 This volume aims to expand existing discourse around
Russian and Soviet energy studies through a sustained and explicit focus
on culture. Despite the universality of energy as an empirical feature of life
on Earth, the nationally inflected cultural myths that underlie human
engagements with it have been highly consequential in the Anthropocene.
The volume’s concentration on Russia responds to a clear need to under-
stand the part Russia plays in social, political, and economic processes
endangering life on Earth. Attention to energy history orients us to the
interconnectedness of world cultures while also revealing the distinct his-
torical trajectory of energy science and politics in Russia and the
Soviet Union.
In the nineteenth century, the new idea of energy as a “power to make
work” reshaped life in the Russian Empire, as it did throughout Europe
and much of the world. Spurred by James Watt’s improved steam engine,
and responding to the capitalist imperative to generate ever-increasing
amounts of mechanical force, European physicists theorized energy as
manifesting in such apparently distinct phenomena as heat, light, magne-
tism, and organic life. With the ascendance of thermodynamics in the
1850s, physicists popularized the discovery that heat proceeds from the
7
Notable precedents for Russian Energy Culture include Anindita Banerjee, “Generating
Power,” in We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (Wesleyan
Univ. Press, 2012), 90–118; Jane Costlow, “Geographies of Loss: The ‘Forest Question’ in
Nineteenth-Century Russia,” in Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-
Century Forest (Cornell Univ. Press, 2013), 81–116; Douglas Rogers, The Depths of Russia:
Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism (Cornell Univ. Press, 2015); Ilya Kalinin,
“Petropoetics,” in Russian Literature Since 1991, Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky,
eds. (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015), 120–44; Eve Blau, Baku: Oil and Urbanism (University
of Chicago Press, 2017); and Jessica K. Graybill, “Emotional Environments of Energy
Extraction in Russia,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers
109, no. 2 (n.d.): 382–94.
8
See, for instance, the special issue of Russian Literature on “Anthropocene and Russian
Literature”—especially Colleen McQuillen, “The Scorched and Depleted Earth: Terrestrial
Decadence in Fin-de-Siecle Russia,” Isabel Lane, “Byproduct Temporalities: Nuclear Waste
in Don Delillo’s Underworld and Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard,” Anindita Banerjee, “The
Atom, the Alien, and Cosmographies of the Anthropocene,” and Jane Costlow, “Animals,
Saints, and the Anthropocene,” Russian Literature 114–5 (2020): 23–43, 105–26,
127–50, 151–74.
motion of particles, which can in turn be harnessed to produce mechanical

work. This understanding realized the steam engine’s full potential, revo-
lutionizing global manufacturing processes and transportation networks.
By revealing the consistent and predictable results of chemical reactions,
the new physics also enabled the use of fossil-fuel hydrocarbons for the
combustion that would power the motors of modernity.
Energy history offers an exception to the stereotype of Russia as per-
petually belated in its industrial development. Though the Russian Empire
lagged behind Western Europe and the United States in terms of motor-
ization, electrification, and the production of coal, the same cannot be said
for oil. By the late 1840s, some of the earliest modern oil drilling in the
world was underway near Baku, the capital of present-day Azerbaijan,
which the Russian Empire had acquired through wars with Persia earlier in
the century. The Russian imperial government’s decision to lease oil fields
in the 1870s brought an influx of foreign owners and their capital, with
the brothers Ludwig and Robert Nobel and others greatly increasing pro-
duction in subsequent decades. As Fig. 1.1 demonstrates, Baku’s spectac-
ular success in the industry quickly became a matter of modern cultural
representation. By the time photographer Alexandre Michon took his sen-
sational Baku oil field films to the Paris Exhibition in 1900, the Russian
Empire had overtaken the United States as the greatest oil producer in
the world.9
Even as the exploitation of fossil fuels facilitated the growth of industry,
energy-based critiques of capitalism flourished. As Anson Rabinbach
showed in his landmark study, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the
Origins of Modernity, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels adapted the key
9
On the history of the Imperial Russian petroleum industry, see Blau, Baku; Nat Moser,
Oil and the Economy of Russia: From the Late Tsarist to the Post-Soviet Period (New York:
Routledge, 2018); Vagit Alekperov, Oil of Russia: Past, Present, and Future, trans. Paul
B. Gallagher and Thomas D. Hedden (Minneapolis, MN: Eastview Press, 2011); Irina
D’iakonova, Neft’ i ugol v energetike tsarskoi Rossii v mezhdunarodnykh sopostavleniiakh
(Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999); Mariia Slavkina, Rossiiskaia dobycha (Moscow: Rodina Media,
2014); R. W. Tolf, The Russian Rockefellers: The Saga of the Nobel Family and the Russian Oil
Industry (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1976); N. A. Luk’ianov, Nobeli Rossii
(Moscow: Zemlia i chelovek, 2006). On Alexandre Michon, see Aydin Kazimzade,
“Celebrating 100 Years in Film, Not 80,” Azerbaijan International, 5 no. 3 (1997): 30–5.
See also, Alexandre Michon’s “The Oil Gush in Balakhany,” film, 43 sec., 1898, Youtube,
accessed June 6, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjKVHrGH_Po. Alexandre
Michon, “The Oil Gush Fire in Bibiheybat,” film, 48 sec., 1898, Youtube, accessed June 6,
2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLuCJukduSw.
Fig. 1.1 Alexandre Michon, “Oil Fountain of the Gorny Cooperative, Struck in
September of 1887 (Balkhany near Baku).” From the entry for “Oil” (“Neft’”) in
Brockhaus and Efron’s Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1891–1907
concept of labor power from the German physicist Hermann von

Helmholtz. Having formulated the law of the conservation of energy in
1847, Helmholtz went on to coin the term “labor power” (Arbeitskraft),
which annihilated distinctions between human and motor energy.10
According to Helmholtz, “The animal organism is no different […] from
a steam-engine, as regards the way it acquires heat and force.”11
The tenets and tropes of the new energy science shaped Russian radical
thought even before the rise of Russian Marxism. The touchstone text for
Russian materialists in the 1860s was Ludwig’s Büchner’s Force and
Matter (1855), which devotes a chapter to what the author calls the
“immortality of force.” Revising his text for a subsequent edition, Büchner
would explicitly equate that principle with energy conservation.12 By
1860, an illegal translation of Büchner’s text was familiarizing young radi-
cals with the discourse of thermodynamics, including the frequent com-
parison of human mental and physical effort to the mechanical work of a
steam engine. “All the forces manifested in the earth,” Büchner writes,
“may be deduced from the sun,” including “the flowing water, the current
wind, the heat of the animal body,” and “the combustibility of wood or
coal.” As if by magic, “combustion” enables “the whole quantity of heat
which has disappeared and was deposited in these materials” to “re-
appear.” In a universalizing gesture, Büchner goes on to compare “the
force with which the locomotive engine rushes along,” produced by the
conversion of “solar heat” into “labor,” to the “labor” that “produces
thoughts in the brain of the thinker, or forges nails under the arm of the
forger.”13 Büchner thus helped popularize not only a materialist
10
Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity
(Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), 55 and 72–6; Hermann von Helmholtz, “The Conservation
of Force: A Physical Memoir” [1847], in Selected Writings of Hermann von Helmholtz, ed.
Russel Kahl (Middletown, Conn., 1971), 3–55; P. M. Harman, Energy, Force, and Matter:
The Conceptual Development of Nineteenth-Century Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1982), 41–5.
11
Hermann von Helmholtz, “Uber die Wechselwirkung der Naturskräfte und die darauf
bezüglichen neuesten Ermittelungen der Physik” [1854], cited in Daniela Steila, Genesis and
Development of Plekhanov’s Theory of Knowledge: A Marxist Between Anthropological
Materialism and Physiology (Dordrecht, Springer Science and Business Media, B.V.:
1991), 116.
12
Louis Büchner, Force and Matter: Empirico-Philosophical Studies, Intelligently Rendered,
J. Frederick Collingwood, 2nd ed. (based on 10th German ed., London: Trübner, 1870), viii.
13
Büchner, Force and Matter, 21.
worldview in general, but contemporary energy science in particular

among Russian readers.
Another figure associated with the rising tide of Russian materialism in
the 1860s was the physiologist Ivan Sechenov, who did not have to depend
on Büchner for an introduction to the new physics because he knew
Helmholtz personally, having studied in his Heidelberg laboratory in
1859.14 Sechenov’s most famous essay, “Reflexes of the Brain” (1863),
offers a mechanistic account of the human mind as “the most intricate of
all machines.”15 Sechenov does not deploy the era’s favored metaphor of
the mind as an engine, a type of machine distinguished by its ability to
convert the energy stored in fuels to mechanical work.16 He borrows freely
from the new energy science, however, in comparing mental processes to
the explosions sparked by gunpowder or the magnetization produced by a
galvanic battery.17
The Founder of Russian Marxism, Georgii Plekhanov, whose writings
displayed pointed interest in Sechenov’s work and an at least indirect
familiarity with Helmholtz’s, followed the lead of Marx and Engels in
deploying energeticist rhetoric in support of socialism.18 Exemplifying the
late-nineteenth-century preference for the new term “energy” (energiia)
over the previously favored “force” (sila) in “Our Differences” (1885),
Plekhanov complained that although “the Russian revolution has an enor-
mous, invincible potential energy,” thus far, the socialists have been unable
to “transform that energy from potential into kinetic.”19
Maxim Gorky, styled in Soviet propaganda as the “father of socialist
realism” and a crucial shaper of Soviet literary and public culture, was
another prominent adherent of energy theory. His vision of a humanity
animated by living currents formed a surprisingly consistent leitmotif in a
14
Steila, Genesis, 112.
15
I. Sechenov, Reflexes of the Brain, trans. S. Belsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 8.
16
Michael Serres describes the discursive shift from the metaphor of the brain as a machine
to that of a brain as an engine as indicative of the new nineteenth-century worldview in
Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore,
1982), p. 71.
17
Sechenov, 17–8.
18
Steila, Genesis, 120–2.
19
Georgii Plekhanov, Our Differences, Marxists.org, https://www.marxists.org/archive/
plekhanov/1885/ourdiff/preface.html; Georgii Plekhanov, Nashi raznoglasiia, in Izbrannye
filosofskie proizvedeniia v piati tomakh (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1956), 1:126–7. On the
replacement of “force” by “energy” as the keyword of the new energy physics, see Harman,
Energy, Force, and Matter, esp. 58–60.
lifetime marked by hairpin ideological turns. Gorky’s ability to seamlessly

weave together such seemingly incompatible intellectual strands as
Nietzsche’s theory of the Übermensch, Cosmist philosopher Nikolai
Fedorov’s commitment to physical immortality, and Stalin-era penal the-
ory sheds light not only on the deeply syncretic nature of early Soviet
socialism, but on the pervasiveness of energy throughout disparate strands
of cultural discourse in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
After 1917, Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders promoted energy as cru-
cial to Russia’s revolutionary project. In a formulation that became a kind
of mantra for the new order, Lenin announced in 1920 that “communism
is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.”20 A year later,
prominent Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai called for the socializa-
tion of housework and childcare so as to simultaneously “save women
from an unproductive expenditure of energy on the family” and “guaran-
tee the labor republic an uninterrupted flow of fresh workers in the
future.”21 Though neither Lenin’s nor Kollontai’s visions would be real-
ized in their lifetimes, subsequent decades of Soviet history saw the mis-
sion of socialist world-building mobilize massive reserves of both human
and non-human energy. No stranger to paradoxes, by the 1930s the Soviet
government had built a sprawling “Gulag archipelago” designed to
exhaust the “human raw material” of political and social “enemies” even
as it developed a vast network of leisure resorts meant to restore the ener-
gies of its “heroes of labor.”22 Following an intense outlay of energies
20
It is worth noting that energeticist rhetoric took a back seat to metallurgic in the years
after the Revolution, when, as Rolf Hellebust has observed, “the essential symbol for com-
munist transformation [became] the metallization of the revolutionary body.” Lenin’s widely
disseminated call for electrification nevertheless demonstrates that energy would retain a
prominent place in the new symbolic order. V. I. Lenin, “Doklad vserosiiskogo tsentral’nogo
ispolnitel’nogo komiteta i soveta narodnykh komissarov o vneshnei i vnutrennei politike 22
dekabria,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 55-i tomakh (Moscow, 1958–1965), 42:159;
Hellebust, Flesh into Metal: Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution (Cornell Univ.
Press, 2003), 39; on the relative weight of metallurgic and energeticist symbolism in early
Soviet culture, see also Rogers, The Depths of Russia, 59–61.
21
Alexandra Kollontai, “The Labor of Women in the Revolution of the Economy,” in
Selected Writings, translated by Alix Holt (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1977), 142–9,
144, 142.
22
The former phrase derives from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s eponymous book, written
between 1958 and 1968, and first published in English and French in 1973; the latter from
a common early-Soviet phrase especially beloved by Maxim Gorky (see, for example, his
contribution to the volume released to celebrate the completion of the White Sea-Baltic
Canal in 1934).
during the Second World War, the Cold War took shape largely as a con-
test over the development of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, and the
symbolic end of that conflict came with the explosions at Chornobyl.
Scholarship on energy culture tends to focus on Western Europe or the
United States, where capitalism has driven increasing energy production
and consumption. Yet the example of Chornobyl confirms that socialism,
too, has contributed to today’s state of environmental crisis. Neither Marx
and Engels, nor their Soviet followers, nor even the Frankfurt School,
which held postwar Western capitalism in especially low esteem, offered
meaningful correctives to modern society’s dependence on toxic energy
sources. Indeed, socialist thinkers starting with Marx considered techno-
logical advancement—with the attendant exploitation of nature and con-
tinued consumption of energy—as essential to the building of a freer
society.23
Recognizing the ecological devastation both capitalist and nominally
socialist or communist regimes have wrought over the past 200 years,
some of the most compelling work on Russian and Soviet environmental
history unsettles the ideological, national, and geographic boundaries that
have often been taken for granted since the Cold War.24 Such scholarship
also underscores the need to foreground Russia in contemporary discus-
sions of environmental degradation and climate violence. Far from mark-
ing “the end of history,” the end of the Cold War ushered in an era of
increasingly dangerous environmental and geopolitical catastrophes, in
which Russia, as a deeply entrenched petro-power, plays a prominent role.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s access to oil and natural
gas as sources of geopolitical and cultural energy has assured its position as
a quasi-imperial global entity. Rather than stymie Russia’s efforts to exploit
its natural resources, climate change is opening new territories for devel-
opment in formerly frozen regions of the Russian North. Whether or not
23
Szeman, “Towards a Critical Theory of Energy,” in Energy Humanities: Current State
and Future Directions, eds. Mišík and Nada Kujundžić, 27, 33.
24
Kate Brown’s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and
American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford Univ. Press, 2013) and Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating
Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (Norton, 2020) deserve special men-
tion here. Each of these books reveals the extent to which Russia, the Soviet Union, and the
United States have unwittingly conspired—under the auspices of economic and ideological
competition—to devastate human and animal populations, whether in the centers of pluto-
nium production that yielded atomic bombs, or along the endlessly shifting coastlines of the
Bering Strait.
Russia manages to keep pace with competitors in the global energy mar-
ket, its exploitation of oil and gas not only as commodities, but as sources
of political clout, guarantees its continued relevance to global
geopolitics.
The cultural dimension of Russia’s efforts at energy dominance deserves
scholarly attention not only in its own right, but also because it directly
affects energy policy. Recent studies have revealed that post-Soviet Russian
energy politics rely not only on Soviet material infrastructures, but also on
Soviet cultural norms.25 Moreover, energy corporations themselves have
become important players in the cultural landscape, filling part of the vac-
uum left by the breakdown of official Soviet culture with museum exhibits
and other programming that seeks to influence Russians’ understandings
of themselves, their country, and their history.26
Keeping in mind the contemporary entanglement of Russian energy
policy with Russia’s (self-) representation in media and the arts, this vol-
ume investigates energy as a shaping force in Russian and Soviet literature,
visual culture, and social practice from the 1860s to the present. This
extended timeline encompasses successive economic transitions, each of
which corresponded to dynamic shifts in the conceptualization and use of
energy—first from the agrarian economy of serfdom to the nascent indus-
trial capitalism made possible by the science of thermodynamics and the
extraction of fossil fuels; then to socialism, with its forced industrialization
campaigns and competition for nuclear supremacy; and, finally, to the
increasingly global and decreasingly industrial capitalism of the late twen-
tieth and twenty-first centuries, when the need for an “energy transition”
to renewables has become clear even if the means of achieving it have not.
The volume’s chapters are arranged chronologically, each illuminating
a particular moment in the broader history of Russian and Soviet energy
culture. Together, they explore how nineteenth-century ideas about
energy and its production structured Russian realist novels and paintings;
how the poetics of energy shaped pre-Revolutionary and Stalinist utopia-
nism; and how specific sources and forms of energy generated distinctive
25
Balmaceda, 46, 95–104; Rogers, 13–4, 33–101.
26
Rogers, 14–6, 211–331.
aesthetic features in Soviet and post-Soviet literature and cinema.27 Such

aesthetic considerations directly relate to the energy crises we face today.
As the contributors to this volume argue, culture propels energy history.
No work more clearly illustrates the profound importance of Russian
energy culture as a catalyst for social and environmental change than
Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s radical novel, What Is to Be Done? (1863). Widely
credited with galvanizing the Russian revolutionary movement and praised
by Lenin as “a thing that supplies energy for a whole lifetime,”
Chernyshevsky’s work offers the first major vision of a Russian socialist
utopia and models the initial stages of building it.28 The ideal society the
author imagines in the section dedicated to “Vera Pavlovna’s Fourth
Dream” attains material and cultural prosperity by harnessing “the tre-
mendous means and resources that once had been wasted or used coun-
terproductively.” Chernyshevsky specifically emphasizes the utopian
channeling of renewable energies. In his heroine’s dream, seasonal work
and travel rhythms maximize the sun’s heat and minimize the unpleasant-
ness of climatic extremes, while canals transform former deserts into fertile
lands whose new vegetation helps replenish the water supply. Meanwhile,
“free and willing labor” restores rather than exhausts the singing toilers of
the future, filling them with “an energy unknown to us” because their
“merriment, enjoyment, and passion” are unhampered by economic or
patriarchal inequalities.29 To be sure, the new society Chernyshevsky’s fol-
lowers created after 1917 fell significantly short of Vera Pavlovna’s eco-
feminist fantasy. Nevertheless, Chernyshevsky’s explicitly energeticist
27
Sources of energy include the sun, wind, flowing water, fossil fuels, uranium, etc. Forms
of energy include thermal, gravitational, mechanical, chemical, electrical, nuclear, etc. A con-
venient summary of these and other forms and sources can be found under the “What is
energy?” heading of the U.S. Energy Information Administration website, https://www.eia.
gov/energyexplained/what-is-energy/.
28
Cited in Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, trans. Michael R. Katz, with an
Introduction by Michael R. Katz and William G. Wagner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press,
2014), 32.
29
Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, 369–78. Chernyshevsky’s vision of restorative labor
corresponds more closely to the ideas of the early Marx of The Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts than to the later Marx of Capital. Rabinbach views the evolution of Marx’s
views on the subject as a testament to the growing influence of thermodynamics on Marx’s
understanding of labor, which he eventually came to see “as an act of conversion rather than
generation.” As a result, “[Marx] shifted his focus from the emancipation of mankind
through labor to the emancipation from productive labor by an even greater productivity.”
Anson Rabinbach, The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor (Fordham, 2018), 7–8.
narrative mobilized two generations of Russian revolutionaries and signifi-

cantly altered the course of world events.
In the essay that follows this introduction, “The Energy of
Chernyshevsky’s Vera Pavlovna in the Modern Cultural Economy,”
Konstantine Klioutchine overturns the standard critical account of What
Is to Be Done?. He reveals the surprising affinity between the ostensibly
proto-socialist text and late-nineteenth-century Russia’s burgeoning con-
sumer culture, which promoted the channeling of personal energies into
economic and technological development. The essay argues that
Chernyshevsky frames women as energizers of social progress, with “Vera
Pavlovna’s Fourth Dream” envisioning “the queen of light” at the center
of the electrical circuitry animating the utopian world of the future. In
Klioutchkine’s view, the privileged position women occupy in What Is to
Be Done? reflects their increased participation as writers and readers in the
contemporary press and, more broadly, in Russia’s developing print cul-
ture. Whereas established readings of the novel consider it a training man-
ual for Russia’s young socialists, this chapter emphasizes the novel’s
recruitment of readers into consumer capitalism.
In “The Energy Trap: Anna Karenina as a Parable for the Twenty-First
Century,” Jillian Porter considers literature’s role in acclimating readers to
new ideas about energy. Highlighting the thermodynamic operations of
the narrative in Anna Karenina (1875–1877), Porter proposes that the
concept of energy as the “power to make work” is embedded in the nov-
el’s structure and style. Even those thermodynamic principles Tolstoy dis-
misses are at work on the level of literary form, confirming that energy
shapes culture in ways that may elude conscious awareness. Together,
Klioutchkine’s and Porter’s chapters reveal that the energeticist undercur-
rents of nineteenth-century Russian literature persisted among authors
with disparate ideological commitments. Like Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy
envisions an alternative to the capitalist exploitation of labor, though he
depicts not a technologically advanced, egalitarian workers’ commune,
but an individual nobleman’s ecstatic performance of traditional agricul-
tural labor alongside peasants on his estate. What unites Chernyshevsky’s
radical novel with Tolstoy’s reactionary one is an energy-inflected poetics
and the portrayal of personal strivings in terms of energy expenditure,
restoration, or waste.
Chapters 4 and 5 analyze the aesthetics of a single source or form of

energy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In “Picturing
Coal in the Donbas: Nikolai Kasatkin and the Energy of Late Realism,”
Molly Brunson explores the representational obstacles that Itinerant
(Peredvizhnik) painter Nikolai Kasatkin encountered as he sought to bring
the Russian Empire’s hidden coal mining operations to view. Identifying a
complex relationship between fossil fuel extraction and the emergence of
modernist aesthetics, Brunson shows how the inaccessibility of the coal
mines and the inscrutability of dust-covered coal miners prompted
Kasatkin to experiment with blackened canvases that convert unseen
human and environmental resources into painterly and political power.
Even as they confront viewers with the potential for worker resistance to
exploitation, Kasatkin’s works reflect coal’s own resistance to realist repre-
sentation and retrain viewers to engage in a new and insistently laborious
mode of perception. While Brunson remains focused on Kasatkin, her
argument has implications for modernism more generally: after reading
this essay, one begins to see coal mines lurking beneath such quintessential
works of abstraction as Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915).
In “Polar Fantasies: Valery Bryusov and the Russian Symbolist Electric
Aesthetic,” Polina Dimova offers further confirmation of modernism’s
entanglement with energy. Against the backdrop of late Imperial Russia’s
mystical-scientific discourses and burgeoning material culture of electric-
ity, Dimova identifies a consistently ambivalent “electric aesthetic” with
political ramifications. Her central example is symbolist author Valery
Bryusov, who both extolled new technology in his electrically illuminated
lyric nightscapes and warned of the dangers of excessive dependence on
electricity in his dystopian “Republic of the Southern Cross” (1904–1905).
Like Brunson’s treatment of Kasatkin, Dimova’s study of Bryusov eluci-
dates more than a single case. Indeed, the confluence of science and the
occult within fin-de-siècle electrification exceeds the temporal and generic
boundaries of symbolism, reemerging throughout this volume as a highly
consequential feature of Russian energy culture.
Chapters 6 to 9 explore the conflicted legacies of revolutionary ener-
getics in the Soviet Union. “Energetic Liquids in Pre-Revolutionary
Russian Utopianism,” by Maya Vinokour, examines the emergence of the
Stalinist conjuncture of liquidity, futuristic utopianism, and personal
responsibility in the decades before 1917. As the Russian autocracy tight-
ened its grip amid rising social unrest, literature and philosophy became
laboratories of future societal organization. Thinkers like Lev Tolstoy,

Nikolai Fedorov, Maxim Gorky, and Alexander Bogdanov promoted a
biocentric self-discipline as the only remedy against moral and physical
degeneration. By imagining immortal, fraternal collectivities relying on
anti-technological, anti-institutional modifications to human nature, cos-
mic space, or time itself, these thinkers prefigured high Stalinism’s glorifi-
cation of individualistic heroism.
Documenting the rhetoric of exhaustion in 1920s-era Bolshevik dis-
course, William Nickell’s “Revolutionary Burnout and the Rise of the
Soviet Rest Regime” chronicles a rising awareness of the energy deficits
Stalinist labor culture would later attempt to redress. In the immediate
aftermath of 1917, revolutionary leaders were already worrying about
how to maintain the energy they and the broader population would need
to build up a new state. This anxiety prompted a reconceptualization of
the revolutionary body as in need of physical and psychological care to
avoid exhausting the energies needed to actually construct communism.
Ironically, the increasingly obvious impracticality of revolutionary asceti-
cism and self-sacrifice spurred the adoption of “bourgeois” medical prac-
tices and the creation of the Soviet Union’s “palaces of rest.” These elite
establishments stood in marked contrast to the growing infrastructure of
the Gulag, which sought to reform enemies of the state through exhaust-
ing “corrective” labor.
In “The Mechanics and Energetics of Soviet Communism: The Poetics
of Peat,” Robert Bird examines an energy source that, while no longer
popular in the present, was crucial to the early Soviet aims of social and
economic transformation.30 Bird argues that the challenges workers faced
in harvesting peat—an objectively inefficient energy source valued for its
abundance in central Russia—prompted a range of aesthetic innovations
by writers and painters attempting to represent socialist construction. In
the mid-1920s, stories by Mikhail Prishvin, Aleksandr Peregudov, and
Aleksandr Iakovlev granted a voice to peat workers by augmenting exist-
ing literary forms with documentary and agitational methods. By the
1930s, artists like Peregudov and Arsenii Tarkovskii instead focused on
peat’s role in powering socialism, dissolving the stuff of peat in the imagi-
nary map of social and cultural forces. This shift from a mechanistic to an
energeticist account of peat corresponded to Nikolai Bukharin’s synthetic
account of nature, labor, and society as a unified force field capable of
30
An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Fall 2011 issue of The Slavic Review.
defying normal physical laws at high enough energy levels.31 Like Brunson’s
examination of coal-inspired modernist works as a challenge to nineteenth-
century realism, Bird’s reading of peat-inspired works by Prishvin and
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn shows how a specific source of energy can become
a medium for political and aesthetic critique. Indeed, Prishvin’s and
Solzhenitsyn’s midcentury works defy Socialist Realist norms by register-
ing the resistance of nature—including language and other artistic media—
to engineered or speculative solutions.
“Leonid Brezhnev and the Elixir of Life,” by Joy Neumeyer, guides
readers through the late Soviet period, when utopian visions of energy
abundance and renewal were becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. As
the Soviet establishment relinquished the future goal of communism in
favor of developed socialism in the present, it transferred energies associ-
ated with earlier mass efforts like industrialization and the conquest of
space to the new project of collective longevity. The most optimistic think-
ers drew on the ideas of Nikolai Fedorov to dream of abolishing death
altogether. The perpetually regenerated Communist Party General
Secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, several times revived from a state of clinical
death, embodied late socialism’s efforts to extend life through scientific
means. Against the stereotypical framing of the late-Soviet period as a time
of “stagnation,” Neumeyer’s focus on the dwindling of ideological, physi-
cal, and political energies within and beyond the Brezhnev regime reveals
the dynamic and unpredictable nature of the USSR’s slow-motion collapse.
Energy Culture’s final chapters consider the release, transformation,
and redistribution of energies that took place in the Soviet Union’s wake.
“Russian Oil: Tragic Past, Radiant Future, and the Resurrection of the
Dead,” by Ilya Kalinin, meditates on the connections between contempo-
rary Russian geopolitical discourse and the historical imagination of oil as
a guarantor of national grandeur. Kalinin distinguishes several periods in
the history of cultural representations of oil based on their respective rela-
tionships to the categories of “living” and “dead.” If early Soviet culture
figured oil as a source of immortality, late-Soviet films like Andron
Konchalovsky’s Siberiade (1978) present it as the substrate of resurrec-
tion—not eternal life, but life after the rupture of death. Meanwhile, the
31
This theorization of Bukharin’s ideas is due to David Joravsky. Relying on the same logic
of abstraction that is central to the scientific concept of energy, Bukharin’s understanding of
nature promoted the return to modernist aesthetics in paintings and stories about peat. See
David Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 1917–1932 (New York, 1961), 101.
patriotic discourse of the Putin era attempts an ideological reproduction

of the Soviet past, but produces only stillborn clones.
“Of Mice and Degenerators: Post-Progress Energy and Posthuman
Bodies in Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx,” by Meghan Vicks, analyzes the
various forms of energy that operate in opposition to progress in Tolstaya’s
novel. The Slynx (2000) is set in a degenerated Moscow reckoning with
the consequences of an apparently nuclear event known as “the Blast.”
Like its speakers, language itself has mutated in response to catastrophic
environmental and societal collapse. The result is that even literate humans
are no longer able to acquire knowledge, or synthesize meaning, from the
written word. Mice are the most common foodstuff and fuel, while other
resources, from oil to the nuclear energy that generated the Blast, remain
stubbornly out of reach. Vicks suggests that the Blast represents both the
pinnacle and crisis of modern progress, which depends as much on the
continuity of human knowledge and reason as it does on energy.
“Hydrocarbons on Hold: Energy Aesthetics of Teriberka in the Russian
Arctic,” by Jessica K. Graybill, Yang Zhang, and Isobel Hooker, considers
Russian energy landscapes as sites of past, present, or future oil and gas
development. The dramatic vistas and complex histories of energy land-
scapes in the Russian Far North lay bare the far-reaching cultural and
aesthetic implications of Soviet-era and present-day hydrocarbon extrac-
tion projects, even—or perhaps especially—where these fail to bear tangi-
ble economic fruit. In a case study of the Russian Arctic village Teriberka,
the authors discuss three aesthetics of energy—latency, spirituality, and
experiential newness—that arise in a setting where eagerly awaited pipe-
lines have yet to materialize. Since the 2012 halting of the Shtokman
Project, which sought to exploit a vast natural gas reserve originally dis-
covered in the Barents Sea in 1988, Teriberka and nearby villages have
existed in a state of suspended animation. Yet this indefinite hold is any-
thing but empty: the very incompleteness of new infrastructures, along-
side the disintegration of Soviet-era buildings, have transformed Teriberka
into a draw for international tourism and countercultural pilgrimage. Sites
like Teriberka, the authors of this chapter show, underscore the unex-
pected energetic potentials of incompleteness and even decay.
Our volume concludes with environmental historian Kate Brown’s
“Afterword on Chernobyl (2019): A Soviet Propaganda Win Delivered 33
Years Late.” Here, Brown uncovers the startling echoes of Soviet propa-
ganda within the hit miniseries that criticized Soviet mishandling of
nuclear energy.32 While other contributors explore the products of Russian

or Soviet energy culture, Brown examines an account of Soviet culture
produced for, and marketed in, the Anglophone West. Her striking claim
that the miniseries reproduces Soviet misrepresentations of nuclear power,
including the occlusion of its risks under normal operating conditions,
confirms the urgency of our volume’s subject matter. Like the traces of
nuclear energy production and disaster, the legacies of Soviet energy his-
tory breach the spatio-temporal borders of the Soviet Union and remain
an active force in twenty-first century world culture.
The essays gathered in Energy Culture reflect global historical trends,
especially the nineteenth-century emergence of the concept of energy as a
fungible property of living and dead matter and the shift from utopian
modernism to post-modern skepticism and present-day despair. If earlier
chapters profile works and figures that emphasize the psychic or physical
energy of individual people, later ones center the environmental degrada-
tion and calamity fossil fuels and nuclear energy can produce. We thus
implicitly argue that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, energy
represented the possibility of a productive human kinship not only with
animals and plants, but with industrial technologies. Yet even this relatively
sanguine concept of energy abounded with apocalyptic potential. The ideal
of energy conservation was swiftly countered by the threat of entropy, and,
as the Stalinist example demonstrates, utopian conceptions of inexhaustible
human energy produced horrifying abuses. Signaling a turning point in
late-Soviet politics and world environmental consciousness alike, the 1986
disaster at Chornobyl made plain the pernicious and enduring effects of
international competition in energy markets and technology.
As of this writing, Russia is months into an unprovoked invasion of
Ukraine. While scholarly and popular etiologies of this aggression are
many, it is clear that Russia’s status as both a petro- and a nuclear power is
key to its ability to wage war. Now more than ever, scholars must confront
the history and legacy of imperial Russian and Soviet conceptions of
energy and the relationships among imperialism, energy extraction, and
climate violence. Most essays in this volume were completed before the
war and do not address the Russian-Ukrainian energy nexus that is crucial
to understanding it. Several other topics also deserve further examination
through the lens of Russian, Soviet, or post-Soviet energy culture,
32
Brown’s review originally appeared in the October 2019 issue of the American
Historical Review.
including forced labor and industrial energy production in the Gulag; the
nuclear arms and space races; the nationally and ethnically inflected energy
cultures of former Soviet Republics in Eastern Europe and Central Asia;
and the Indigenous energy cultures of Russia’s Far East and North.
Recognizing the enormous potential of the subject and the breadth of
scholarly expertise required to illuminate it fully, the editors hope this col-
lection facilitates future investigation and provokes continued conversa-
tion on energy culture across and beyond the former Soviet space.
CHAPTER 2
The Energy of Chernyshevsky’s Vera

Pavlovna in the Modern Cultural Economy
Konstantine Klioutchkine
One of the more provocative questions in Chernyshevsky’s central philo-

sophical statement, “The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy”
(1860), involves the difference between Isaac Newton and a chicken.
Chernyshevsky’s answer is that both are animated by the same forces. At
the level of living beings, these forces manifest themselves in the “process
[ongoing] in the nervous system.” However sophisticated Newton’s men-
tal life might be, its essence is the same as that of a chicken. Chernyshevsky
insists on the material unity of all being, whose forms vary according to
the different formulas organizing the combinations of its basic elements.
Essentially the same processes—Chernyshevsky continues—animate “the
steam engine” and the “heap of rot,” “the oak tree” and “grass,” “the
eagle” and “the fly.”
Chernyshevsky’s provocative comparisons, while articulating his mate-
rialist monism, also happen to be gendered. The more developed forms of
K. Klioutchkine (*)
Pomona College, Claremont, CA, USA
e-mail: kk014747@pomona.edu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Switzerland AG 2023
J. Porter, M. Vinokour (eds.), Energy Culture, Literatures,
Cultures, and the Environment,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14320-5_2
22 K. KLIOUTCHKINE
life—Newton, the steam engine, the oak tree, and the eagle—are mascu-
line. Their lesser counterparts—the chicken, the heap of rot, the grass, and
the fly—are feminine.1 Ostensibly incidental to Chernyshevsky’s claims,
the logic of gender would, nonetheless, return, though with a marked dif-
ference, in his seminal novel What Is to Be Done? (1863).
“The Anthropological Principle” revealed the development of a new
cultural conception of life, and human life in particular, over the course of
the nineteenth century. Chernyshevsky’s reference to the nervous system
and the steam engine evoked the paradigmatic shift of metaphors associ-
ated with this cultural development: the notion of l’homme-machine was
being replaced by that of l’homme-engine.2 Whereas the metaphor of the
machine suggested that a person was activated by external sources of
power, the metaphor of the engine suggested that a person was driven by
internal energy. The growing emphasis on energy was associated with
interrelated scientific developments, which Barri J. Gold has described in
the following terms: “as the word and concept of energy emerge from the
consolidation of disparate observables, things that look different—most
notably heat, light, electricity, magnetism, gravitational attraction, and
mechanical work—come to be understood as manifestations of the same
thing. For a while, some will call it force. [… All] eventually [will settle] on
energy.”3
Informed by this broad cultural shift, Chernyshevsky’s materialist vision
had a compelling effect on generations of young educated people emerg-
ing in the spaces of Russian modern life in the 1860s and the decades that
followed. His texts, and especially What Is to Be Done?, proved a powerful
force shaping the lives of his readers. Prevalent interpretations of the novel
by its early adherents, as well as by cultural historians, have emphasized the
importance of its blueprints for personal and social progress from the
existing realities of Russian life to socialism and communism. For all its
progressive appeal, however, the novel’s impact needs to be viewed apart
1
N.G. Chernyshevskii, “Antropologicheskii printsip v filosofii,” in Polnoe sobranie sochine-
nii v piatnadtsati tomakh (Moskva: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1939–1953), 7:278 (all
translations from Russian in this chapter are my own—KK).
2
Michel Serres, “Paris 1800,” in The History of Scientific Thought: Elements of a History of
Science, Ed. Michel Serres (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 436–40; Michel Serres, Feux et sig-
naux de brume: Zola (Pares: Gasset, 1975), 209–10; Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot:
Desire and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), 41.
3
Barri J. Gold, Thermopoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge, MA:
MIT, 2010), 5.
2 THE ENERGY OF CHERNYSHEVSKY’S VERA PAVLOVNA IN THE MODERN… 23
from the teleological projections toward the Russian Revolution. In order

to gain its enormous influence, the novel had to address its readers’ pro-
foundly confusing and ambivalent experience in the ordinary present
transpiring in the context of developing capitalism.
With this historical context in view, my essay explores the relationship
between Chernyshevsky’s scientistic account of energy and his novel’s
striking foregrounding of women. Whereas Chernyshevsky’s philosophical
treatise routinely privileges abstract masculinity, his far more influential
novel effects a gender reversal in order to rely on the cultural resources of
femininity. What Is to Be Done? ascribes to women superior neurophysio-
logical power relative to that of men. This superiority makes women par-
ticularly effective fictional characters for generating narrative interest.
More broadly, neurophysiological superiority makes women capable of
focusing the circuitry of social erotics in a way that transforms them into a
leading force for energizing social change. As I pursue the novel’s empha-
sis on women’s neurophysiological superiority, I will be arguing that this
emphasis worked to address its readers’ experience by engaging them as
consumers and producers in the cultural economy of print-capitalism, of
which What Is to Be Done? proved one of the most successful products.
My procedure will be as follows. I start with a survey of the novel’s
popular-scientific context and then describe the novel’s account of the
functioning of energy in human lives. As the issue of gender becomes
increasingly pronounced, I switch to describing the novel’s reliance on
Vera Pavlovna’s romantic adventures for the gendered power of its narra-
tive appeal. At that point, I offer a hypothesis regarding the underappreci-
ated cultural sources of Chernyshevsky’s foregrounding of the heroine. I
conclude by sketching the way in which the novel inscribed its readers into
developing capitalism as productive subjects of and for the press.
Cultural Signposts of Popular Science

Insofar as Chernyshevsky, like his fellow journalists, worked in the field of
print-mediated information for the general public, his scientific points of
reference inevitably related less to current developments in diverse aca-
demic fields than to discussions of those developments in journalism and
fiction. Among the latter, especially prominent was Ivan Turgenev’s novel
Fathers and Sons (1862), which established scientific signposts for the
progressively-minded young readers Turgenev identified in his famous
coinage of “nihilists.”
24 K. KLIOUTCHKINE
Rejecting fiction and poetry, the novel’s nihilist hero, Bazarov, insists
that a person’s intellectual development proceed through reading popular-
science texts, like Force and Matter (1855) by the German physiologist
Ludwig Büchner. This influential book paradigmatically described the
unity of matter as actuated by force. Informed by such a worldview,
Bazarov, a student of natural sciences aiming to become a doctor, occupies
himself on a summer vacation by dissecting frogs—in order, he explains,
“to discover what happens inside” them. He believes that this practice will
lead him to understand what happens inside his human patients. Bazarov
assumes that physiology will eventually explain the overall logic of human
life, but his current knowledge is insufficient for him to understand the
immediate meaning and direction of his own existence beyond engaging
in scientific study. His “nihilism,” while referring primarily to his rejection
of spiritual and aesthetic values, also signals his difficulty in gaining a
purely scientific grasp on his own experience.4 Chernyshevsky’s What Is to
Be Done? would, within two years, successfully address Bazarov’s existen-
tial challenge.
Bazarov’s focus specifically on frogs evoked scientific work by Wilhelm
von Helmholz and his Russian student, Ivan Sechenov, whose discoveries
in physiology involved experiments with frogs and suggested that brain
activity was, fundamentally, accountable to neurophysiology. Helmholz’s
multifaceted work exemplified the developments in a range of scientific
disciplines at mid-century as he made contributions to physics, mechanics,
sensory physiology, ophthalmic optics, electrodynamics, chemical thermo-
dynamics, and electromagnetism, as well as aesthetics. Sechenov, a promi-
nent figure in Russian cultural life and a friend of Chernyshevsky, gave
public lectures on physiology in St. Petersburg in 1860, and would become
especially famous for his controversial essay “The Reflexes of the Brain” in
1863. Sechenov would later describe his misgivings about his essay’s
reception by the general public, which took his local scholarly conclusions
as a suggestion that all manifestations of human consciousness derived
exclusively from neurophysiological processes.5
4
I. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos’mi tomakh (Moskva: Nauka,
1960–1968), 8:212, 238–9.
5
Michael Holquist, “Bazarov and Sečenov: The Role of Scientific Metaphor in Fathers and
Sons,” Russian Literature XVI (1984), 366–7; M.N. Shaternikov, “The Life of
I.M. Sechenov,” in I.M. Sechenov: Biographical Sketch and Essays (New York: Arno Press,
1973), xxiv.
In the context of such overarching popular-scientific claims, Turgenev’s

Fathers and Sons brought about polemics on a number of cultural issues,
including the figure of the “new person,” his or her role in social life and
historical development, the functions of literary representation and aes-
thetics, as well as the proper practices of everyday personal conduct. These
polemics produced a consensus that Bazarov was, in fact, representative of
the “new people,” but that his early example demanded that his followers
engage in developing and specifying what his figure had to offer, especially
in light of rapid advances in scientific thinking.
In these debates, Dmitri Pisarev emerged as a leading critic. He cele-
brated Turgenev’s vision of Bazarov and promoted the role of natural
sciences in explaining the full range of life. Pisarev’s success involved, in
large measure, his ability to describe human experience—his own,
Bazarov’s, and that of the new people—as deriving from physiological
processes. His emphasis on science had been prepared by his journalism
popularizing scientific views, including those by Humboldt, Büchner, Carl
Vogt, and Jacob Moleschott. Pisarev’s rhetoric was even more extreme
than Chernyshevsky’s, who had served as a source of Pisarev’s inspiration.
In his essay “Physiological Sketches,” written as Turgenev was working on
Fathers and Sons, Pisarev claimed: “Gasses, salts, acids, and bases unite and
change form, divide and decay, circle and move without goal and without
stopping—they pass through our bodies, and that is all life and history.”6
The vision of materialist monism proved effective for a number of rea-
sons. Insofar as Chernyshevsky and Pisarev claimed that all persons were
driven by the same forces, they encouraged their readers to view them-
selves as equals regardless of existing social hierarchies. The emphasis on
internal processes in organizing a person’s life inspired readers to view
themselves as independent from external circumstances. Furthermore,
external conditions could now be viewed not only as socially unjust, but
also as restrictive of individual self-realization for objective scientific rea-
sons. Finally, Chernyshevsky and Pisarev empowered readers by promising
that scientific knowledge would offer them the kind of control over their
lives that led both to individual success and social improvement. Readers
who might have viewed themselves as inferior on account of social status
turned into autonomous individuals whose knowledge made them cultur-
ally superior—so much so that they became the leaders of social progress.
6
Quoted in Peter C. Pozefsky, The Nihilist Imagination: Dimitrii Pisarev and the Cultural
Origins of Russian Radicalism (1860–1868) (Peter Lang, 2003), 42.
26 K. KLIOUTCHKINE
Progressive journalists’ emphasis on popular science encouraged read-

ers not only to study, but also to engage in their own publishing projects
in order to further scientifically informed social change. Among such read-
ers was Vladimir Kovalevsky, future husband of the first woman professor
of mathematics, Sofia Kovalevskaya. Before marrying Sofia and pursuing
the study of paleontology, Vladimir had spent much of the 1860s publish-
ing Russian translations from European scientific texts in St. Petersburg.7
The focus on natural sciences as having formative power in organizing
progressive lives continued throughout the decade and beyond. In 1869,
the radical Marxist critic Petr Tkachev, while reviewing women’s novels,
encouraged readers to abandon literature in favor of studying Sechenov’s
scientific writings.8
The emphasis on science in organizing progressive lives found its most
influential manifestation in Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done? Whereas
Bazarov’s inquiry into the frog led him to as-yet unanswerable questions
regarding the meaning of life, Chernyshevsky’s novel spelled out the
answers and offered blueprints for personal behavior in advancing social
progress. Those answers, as Bazarov had suggested, derived from scientific
explanations of how the forces at the core of all matter animated the neu-
rophysiological resources powering their progressive subjects’ ordi-
nary lives.
The Scientistic Framework of What Is to Be Done?

What Is to Be Done? explains that uniform processes constitute diverse
levels of being. In the novel, a social circle comprised of “new people”
discusses, in the spirit of Pisarev’s afore-cited comment, the chemical
foundations of soil science, “the crucial importance of distinguishing
between different forms of desire,” political questions, and the “laws of
historical progress.”9 Ultimately, the answers to all these questions relate
7
Ann Hibner Koblitz, The Convergence of Lives: Sofia Kovalevskaya, Scientist, Writer,
Revolutionary (Birkhäuser: Boston, 1983), 69.
8
Petr Tkachev, “Podrastaiushchie sily,” in “Sovremennoe obozrenie,” Delo 9 (1869):
1–27; Tkachev, “Podrastaiushchie sily,” in “Sovremennoe obozrenie,” Delo 10 (1869):
1–32. On “Zhenshchiny-proletarii” as part of the “intelligentsia,” see “Podrastaiushchie
sily,” in “Sovremennoe obozrenie,” Delo 9 (1869): 9.
9
Chernyshevskii, Chto delat’?, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 11:118–9. Further citations of
this work are given in the text.
to the process that organizes atoms in motion. In an early instance, the

novel explains that, were one to grasp this premise, one would understand
the agricultural functioning of the soil, both good and bad. Fertile soil
consists of “healthy elements,” “atoms” engaged in vigorous circulation.
Bad soil, by contrast, is filled with “unhealthy elements,” prevented from
circulating adequately. The novel invokes Justus von Liebig’s work on the
chemical basis of agriculture to claim that proper drainage would improve
bad soil to make it fertile. The logic of the particles’ motion in the soil
corresponds to an analogous process in human life. At an “anthropologi-
cal” level, motion equates to work: the persons who work more vigorously
are healthier than their idle counterparts. If the less active adopt scientific
principles regarding the role of work, they will become more mobile,
healthier, and happier.
Healthy persons’ external activity derives from their bodies’ internal
processes. Healthy bodies rely on the vigorous functioning of nerves and
on the active circulation of blood. Vera Pavlovna’s second husband,
Aleksandr Kirsanov, a physiologist and a doctor, explains that the “excita-
tion of the nervous system,” the “beating of the heart,” and the circula-
tion of blood generate the “heat” in the “entire chest.” Together, these
processes animate a person to engage in various “pleasurable” activities
(268–9). Kirsanov’s comments evoke Claude Bernard’s notion of the
milieu intérieur, which described the physiological stability of the human
body. Through the vasomotor combination of nerve functioning and
blood circulation, Bernard’s milieu is a condition of a person’s relative
independence from the external environment. What Is to Be Done? notes
that Bernard, along with other leading natural scientists, has recognized
Kirsanov’s scholarly achievements (146). In keeping with that scientific
framework, the novel’s progressive characters rely on internal resources of
energy as the source of their agency in acting independently from oppres-
sive social circumstances.
At the level of social and economic life, the novel provides blueprints
for the organization of workers’ cooperatives by describing Vera Pavlovna’s
workshop producing women’s clothing. Communal organization of labor
engages individual persons, the atoms of society, in productive circulation.
Individual resources involved in shared labor, the distribution of its
rewards, mutual education, and common leisure improve the functioning
of all participants. Even those who had been corrupted by external social
circumstances, such as prostitutes, turn into happy and productive actors.
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person than by letter. After a little talk it was arranged that as soon as the
boys were off I might have you. The method of taking possession was left to
myself. I might write for you and enclose this, or do as I chose about
communicating your mother's consent to my plan."
Mrs. Worsley handed a note to Nettie, and the girl exclaimed, "How kind of
you, aunty! To think of you travelling so far out of your way on my account, first
to Scarborough, then to this place! How can I thank you?"
"Do not try, dear. Read your mother's note," said Mrs. Worsley. "But please do
not put me down as another sham, because I asked you so many questions
when I already knew the answer to some of them. I wanted to have a peep
into your mind. As to Bolton, I inquired after her in all good faith, for neither
your mother nor Laura told me that she was with them, or how very much you
had been left to yourself."
Nettie gave her godmother a girlish hug and a shower of kisses, then applied
herself to the letter, whilst the boys expressed their delight at her improved
prospects, after the manner of their kind.
They repeatedly embraced their sister, showered thanks on Mrs. Worsley in

rather slangy English, and finally gave relief to their exuberant spirits by
dancing round the den in a sort of wild Indian style, which was not calculated
to render the reading of the letter an easy task to Nettie. The purport of it was,
however, soon mastered. Mrs. Clifford wrote warmly of Mrs. Worsley's
kindness, and told her daughter that she must consider herself at liberty to
leave Hoyden Hill as soon as Williams returned and the boys were gone.
There were loving messages and a promise of another letter to follow by post,
and that was all.
Annette's dreams were pleasant ones for that night, but the waking was less
agreeable. The morning brought the promised letter, with detailed instructions
as to certain matters for the house and the boys, and a cheque to meet the
expenditure involved by their coming journey, and the domestic supplies
alluded to. But for Annette herself there was nothing, not even a hint as to
possible wants. The girl thought she must be mistaken, that there must be
another enclosure; but a further examination revealed the fact that the
envelope contained nothing more.
"How can I go?" she exclaimed. "Mamma knows that I need at least a couple
of new gowns to make me fairly presentable, and it would be a dreadful
scramble to get one in the short time there is. Besides, Laura's last are unpaid
for, and I will not go for more on credit, though I suppose that is what she must
have meant me to do. Mamma must feel that I cannot go away without even
the means to pay my travelling expenses, or a spare pound in my pocket."
Annette's self-communings had reached this point when Mrs. Worsley entered
the den, where breakfast awaited her coming.
"I thought you were still asleep, aunty," said the girl. "I have been twice to your
door, but everything was so quiet that I stole softly down again. The boys had
to go, you know, to be in time for school, so I shall have you all to myself.
Have you rested well?"
"Delightfully, Nettie, and I am quite ready for breakfast, and work to follow, for
we must begin our preparations for the journey without an hour's delay."
Annette's face flushed and paled as she turned her mother's letter round in
her fingers in an absent fashion. Then she said, "I am afraid I can make none.
Mamma has written about everyone but me. She must know that I need more
than her permission to go with you."
"My dear, I am sorry that you have had a moment's anxiety on that score,
which I might have prevented by a word. Your mother and I arranged
everything on your behalf when we met at Scarborough. This is for you,
Nettie, to meet any minor expenses, and after breakfast we will see what sort
of a substitute for the fairy godmother I shall make in providing the more
substantial portion of your outfit." Mrs. Worsley handed Annette an envelope
addressed in her mother's handwriting, and on opening it she found, to her
utter amazement, a ten-pound note.
"For me, aunty? How has mamma spared it? Did she really send it?" asked
Annette, half ashamed of her question.
"I saw Mrs. Clifford place the note in the envelope, which she addressed, and
then handed to me, for your sole use, my dear, if that is what you mean. And
she sent her love, and hoped you would spend it judiciously."
The young face brightened again at these words.
"Mamma is very kind; I did not expect this," she said. "Now I can manage
quite nicely; but how disgracefully selfish I am to keep you talking about my
concerns when you must be famishing for your breakfast!"
"Not famishing, dear, but with a good healthy appetite to enjoy this tempting
breakfast," replied Mrs. Worsley. "But, Nettie, you have not asked whither we
are bound when we leave Heydon Hill."
"I thought I was going home with you, aunty."
"Home, in one sense, dear, but not to the one I call my very own. We are
going to my brother's."
"To Broadlands! You cannot mean it?"
"I am quite in earnest. My brother and his wife have given you a warm corner
in their warm hearts, Nettie; your last year's visit established you as first
favourite with them and the children, and I believe if I were to make my
appearance alone, I should be sent back to fetch you. The people at Ferndene
are having a large party of young guests, too. I believe almost the same who
were there twelve months ago, so you will meet a host of old young
acquaintances."
Mrs. Worsley was looking straight at Nettie as she spoke, and, lo! Across the
girl's face stole a look of indescribable gladness, along with a rich rosy glow
that spread from cheek to brow; a sort of dancing, happy light, the reflex of
some deep-seated joy, brought to the innocent young heart by her friend's
words.
Nettie turned away quickly and shyly, as if afraid that secret of hers should be
read, and she could not have borne a significant look just then, much less a
jesting word. That expression, however, set Mrs. Worsley thinking and
wondering whether, amongst the guests at Ferndene, Cinderella might have
met her prince. Truly the girl was very young in her ways and simple in her
tastes, as innocent of flirting and coquetry as the most loving mother could
desire her child to be. But time had not been standing still with Nettie any
more than others; she would keep her nineteenth birthday during the visit to
Broadlands.
CHAPTER III.
BREAKFAST was over, and Nettie was standing in Mrs. Worsley's bedroom,
speechless and overwhelmed at the sight which met her view. Spread around
her were the contents of one of those large boxes which she had assisted
Sarah Jane to carry up-stairs on the preceding evening. There were braveries
of all kinds suited to a girl like herself, and fit for wear in such a home as
Broadlands. Nothing very costly, but all beautiful, dainty, and suggestive of
refined taste and a sweet, pure-minded girl wearer.
It was not the first time that Mrs. Worsley had supplied deficiencies in Nettie's
wardrobe, and the measures taken a year before would, she knew, still be
near enough to go by. She shrewdly suspected that her request for the girl's
company would be cheerfully acceded to if no demand were made on the
mother's purse to furnish the needed outfit. Even that ten-pound note which
had called forth such fervent gratitude, though nominally sent by her mother,
had first been given to Mrs. Clifford by Mrs. Worsley for the purpose.
"She is rich, and has neither chick nor child. All her own relatives are richer
still, so why should not Nettie be the better for having a wealthy sponsor?"
said Mrs. Clifford to her eldest daughter. "Besides, by having nothing to buy
for Nettie, I shall be able the better to supply your wants."
So Laura, too, had cause to rejoice, for she benefited indirectly by Mrs.
Worsley's gifts, in having money spent upon her wardrobe, some of which
must otherwise have gone for Nettie's.
Standing amidst a wealth of pretty things, Nettie said—"These are all far too
handsome, and you are much too kind, aunty, darling. I cannot thank you as I
ought. I feel that I shall be a grand sham myself amongst the dear friends at
Broadlands—'a daw with borrowed feathers.'"
"Not borrowed, Nettie; these things are truly your own. Not shams any more
than you are, my dear, honest-hearted lassie. They are fashioned by human
fingers, not transformed by the touch of a fairy's wand, so you can wear them
without fear that they will resume some uncanny shape. And they come from
one who loves you dearly, Nettie, and who has too much of this world's gear,
and no kindred of her own who need to share it. I settled about these trifles
before I even saw your mother. I never dreamed that I might find you too
proud to accept at once, and without misgivings, your godmother's little gift."
Nettie burst into tears, and flinging her arms round her friend's neck, begged
to be forgiven.
"Of course it is hateful pride and horrid ingratitude," she cried. "But I did not
see it in that way before; I only felt overwhelmed with your kindness, and that
it was all too much for you to do for my sake. I have had shamefully ungrateful
thoughts about being left here, and have felt angry at mamma and Laura, and
generally rebellious on account of my lot, instead of just accepting it as from
God's hand, and making the best of it. And all the while He was ordering
everything for my good, putting it into your heart to be so kind to me, and
planning that I should be invited to the place I longed to visit above every
other in the world. I am ashamed of myself."
"That is right, darling," replied Mrs. Worsley. "Now you are looking at things in
a proper light, and there is nothing to be done but to continue our
preparations."
After this the hours seemed to fly, so much had to be done; but further help
was obtained to sustain the "reed." Williams returned in due time, the boys set
out for Cumberland in the highest of spirits, and a couple of hours later Mrs.
Worsley carried off Nettie, and arrived in the early afternoon at the station
nearest to Broadlands.
On the platform were three or four of Mrs. Worsley's nephews and nieces, wild
with delight at seeing her with Nettie in charge, and at the cry of the first,
"Here's Nettie! Hurrah!" The shout was taken up by the others, who each
cheered in a different key, and made the station resound with their shrill young
voices.
There was another person who met the train, and handed the ladies out, and
who, though he did not join in the cheer raised by the juniors, managed to
express his pleasure at sight of the travellers in no less eloquent language.
Truly if ever eyes spoke of gladness, the fine grey ones of Arthur Boyd told
Nettie Clifford that the sight of her bright, blushing face had vastly increased
his present feeling of happiness.
What halcyon days followed! Broadlands itself, with just its regular inmates,
would have been a paradise to Nettie, nestling, as it did, among glorious
woods which sheltered without hiding it, and yet within walking distance of the
sea on one side and a lovely undulating country on the other three. There
were endless drives and plenty of pleasant neighbours within reach, nearest
of all Ferndene, the residence of old Sir Henry Boyd, Arthur's uncle, with
whom Nettie was a prime favourite. He and his dear old wife were deeply
attached to their nephew and heir, very anxious for him to marry, and yet in
great dread lest he should fall a victim to a mere pretty face.
They had a horror of fastness and flirtation. They believed in one true, ever-
growing holy love which should become stronger and more self-devoting
through each year of wedded life, as theirs had done. Their nephew would be
independent of money considerations; they wanted him to have a fortune in
the wife herself; and so, when twelve months before they thought their
nephew was learning to care for Nettie Clifford, they were ready to give their
hearty consent if he would only ask it.
"Just the girl for Arthur," they had said to each other. Well born and educated,
with good health, good looks, a pure mind, and habits untainted by fashion
and folly, yet as bright as a bird; one in whose society young and old found
pleasure. What could they desire better? Yet the girl's visit had come to an
end, and Arthur had not spoken. The hopes of the old couple had died away,
and twelve months had come and gone in the meanwhile.
Now Nettie was again at Broadlands, and day by day she and Arthur met.
Lookers-on began to whisper, and some that had hoped Sir Henry's heir
would seek a wife in a different direction lost hope.
At last a day came when the young man opened his heart to the relatives who
had been as father and mother to him, and asked their consent and blessing
on his union with Nettie Clifford, provided he could win hers.
They answered him together: "May God bless you as we do, and speed your
wooing! 'A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband.' We could desire no
better fortune for our boy than to win such a wife as Annette Clifford."
With a light heart Arthur set out for Broadlands. There was to be a garden
party in the lovely grounds that afternoon, and he had no doubt that he should
find an opportunity of telling Nettie all that was in his mind. He did not,
however, see her immediately on his arrival. The grounds were extensive, and
before Arthur Boyd made one amid the crowd of guests who kept pouring
through the wide gateway, Nettie had been pounced upon and carried off to
take part in a game at tennis.
The decisive set was just at an end when he caught sight of her, flushed and
smiling, after a hard-won victory. But bright as was the colour on the girl's
cheek, it deepened at his approach, and it was with a look of frank pleasure
that she laid her hand in his and bade him welcome.
But while Nettie's roses deepened, those on Arthur's face died away, and he
became deadly pale as he glanced at the girl's extended hand, for there,
glittering on her "engaged finger," was a superb diamond, a beautiful single
stone of bluish white, a stone of great value, as the merest ignoramus could
tell. Surely the presence of such a jewel in such a place could have only one
meaning.
Arthur hardly knew what he said. He knew that Nettie looked half frightened,
and asked if he were ill, and that he had answered in the negative, and got
away out of sight. True, she seemed to look wistfully after him, and her lips
moved, as if she were begging him to stay. Probably she was shocked at what
she had done, and wished to deprecate the grief and resentment his face
must have expressed.
All their happy hours, all her sweet girlish ways, all the tell-tale blushes at his
coming, all that he had thought he read in the shy eyes that were wont to
droop when he looked too steadily in their direction, all these things were as
nothing to him any more than others. Someone—Arthur thought he knew who
—had offered, and been promptly accepted by the portionless girl, who was
bound to marry well, whether true love were included in the bargain or not.
Arthur could not leave Broadlands at once, as he longed to do, for his aunt
and uncle, with other friends, were to come later, and he had promised to wait
for and return with them. So he strolled away to a lonely part of the grounds,
and having passed a miserable hour there, once more bent towards the
entrance-gates, where he met Nettie.
Surely the girl must have been miserable too, for she looked pale and
troubled, and there were signs about her usually bright eyes that were
suggestive of recent tears. And lo! As he glanced at her hand which hold up a
parasol, he saw that it was unadorned. The ring was gone.
"There must have been some stupid mistake," he thought. "I have taken for
granted what had probably no reality. Only Nettie's own lips shall convince me
that she is other than the pure, true-hearted girl I have ever judged her to be."
To think was to act. There was no one else very near, so Arthur joined Nettie,
and a new light came to her sweet face, and new roses sprang into being on
her cheeks. He began to tell his tale, strolling the while into a by-path, and had
got as far as the ring.
"I came on purpose to speak to you to-day, Nettie, bringing with me the
blessing and approval of my dear aunt and uncle, who would welcome you
with open arms as my wife," he said. "There was only one person for me
amongst all the guests, and when I saw you, darling, sweet, and fair, and true,
I longed to clasp you to my heart and tell you that I gave you my whole best
love a year ago. And then I looked at something sparkling on your finger, and
saw a ring, and feared that someone had been beforehand with me, so went
away miserable, without a word. What did the ring mean, dear, for you wear it
no longer?"
Nettie glanced at her hand as Arthur alluded to the ring, and gave a cry of
horror.
"What shall I do?" she cried. "I did not know it was gone. I would not lose it for
anything. Please do not stop me!"
Away fled Nettie towards the house, leaving Arthur with his love story
unfinished, and to put what construction he chose upon her precipitate retreat.
To pursue the girl would have been to cause remark, and Arthur went more
slowly in the direction taken by Nettie, his mind full of half-formed plans for an
immediate voyage to the Antipodes.
Mrs. Worsley was sitting on the terrace, and Annette must have passed her on
her way to the house. Arthur stood by her for a little while, talking of the party,
the lovely weather, and the manifest enjoyment of the guests, but his manner
was constrained, and his answers often irrelevant. He was on the point of
turning away, when Annette once more appeared, tripping lightly towards
them, with a radiant face.
"Aunty, dear aunty, please take this back with my best thanks, and never, if
you love me, ask me to wear borrowed feathers again. I have been in dreadful
trouble. I missed it from my finger, or rather Mr. Boyd did, and I thought I had
lost it in the park. Then I remembered I had been to my room to wash my
hands after preparing some fruit for the children, and I left Mr. Boyd very
unceremoniously, to see if I had laid it on the dressing-table. It was not there,
and I was almost in despair, when where do you think I found it? Exactly fitted
into the centre hole of the drainer which covers the sponge bowl. How glad I
was! I am not fit to be trusted with valuables, you see, for, being
unaccustomed to them, I forget that I have them. Thank you a thousand times
for the loan of the ring, aunty, and most of all for freeing me from the awful
responsibility of having valuables not my own to take care of. I will never wear
borrowed feathers again as long as I live."
As Nettie spoke, she placed the ring which had caused Arthur's misery in Mrs.
Worsley's hand, and then gave a sweet, shy, upward glance at the young
man, which seemed to say that the story he had begun to tell would now find
an attentive listener.
Mrs. Worsley, with a laughing face, told Arthur how she had insisted on
Nettie's wearing one of her rings because the girl possessed scarcely any
ornaments of her own. "It will be hers some day," she added, "but I must take
care of it until she is fit to be trusted with the custody of valuables."
Arthur mentally dissented from Mrs. Worsley's statement that Nettie

possessed few ornaments. He thought that truth, modesty, unselfishness, a
pure, tender nature, and a warm, faithful heart were better adornments and
possessions than all the jewels in the world. But he did not trouble to tell her
so, for some friends were approaching, whom Mrs. Worsley joined. And Arthur
told his thoughts to Nettie instead, and completed the story begun a little while
before.
He must have had faith, too, in Nettie's powers to take care Of a ring, for when
the young people met the party from Ferndene, there glittered on the girl's
engaged finger a most beautiful specimen of the jeweller's art, the diamonds
in which were worthy to follow the borrowed gem.
Thus Arthur Boyd won Nettie for a wife; and the dear old couple at Ferndene
rejoiced that their adopted son would soon give them the daughter they
coveted above all others. And there was rejoicing at Scarborough, and Mrs.
Clifford wrote that her darling Nettie had more than fulfilled her most cherished
hopes by making so wise a choice.
That Mrs. Worsley played the true mother's part to her goddaughter need
hardly be told, or that it was on her breast that the girl shed the glad tears
which came from a heart almost too full of happiness as she said, "How can I
be thankful enough for God's great goodness to me? How be ashamed
enough of my old want of faith, my repinings, and discontent?"
Mrs. Arthur Boyd has no lack of jewels now, and has long since been
accustomed to the charge of articles of value of her very own. But if she had
never possessed any, her friends think that those better ornaments which her
husband valued most would have been conspicuous in her life and actions.
Also that the one lesson would have sufficed to prevent her from ever making
a second appearance in "borrowed feathers."
A STORY OF AN ANGLE WINDOW
CHAPTER I.
"STEPBROTHER DICK."
"You will have to be father, mother, and brother to the girls, Dick. It is a great
charge, but you will not shirk it. I know what you are, dear boy, and now, more
than ever, I thank God, who took my only son, that He left me you."
The speaker had not long to live, and she knew it. She had four girls to leave
motherless, and she had been ten years a widow. He to whom she spoke was
her stepson, Richard Maynard Whitmore, who was sitting by her bed and
looking in her wan face with loving, troubled eyes. His answer was not long in
coming. Holding the invalid's thin hand in a gentle, caressing clasp, the young
man replied, "As you have been a true mother to me, so will I be to the girls all
you say, as God shall enable me."
A beautiful glad light overspread Mrs. Whitmore's face as the words fell on her
ear. Dick's honest eyes were turned towards her, and though he spoke quietly,
his tone was solemn and earnest, as befitted the occasion and the
responsibility he was taking upon himself.
"Kiss me, dear Dick."
Richard rose and bent his tall figure until his lips touched those of his
stepmother. She made an effort to clasp her thin arms round his neck, and
after kissing him again and again, she held him for a few moments in a close
embrace. Thus was the compact sealed.
Mrs. Whitmore knew well what a noble nature was covered under Dick's quiet,
undemonstrative manner. The few words he had just spoken were quite
enough to remove every anxious thought from her mind—save one.
Even before they were spoken the mother had said to herself, "The girls will
be safe so long as they are sheltered by Dick's roof. He will be a true
guardian, and will watch over and guide them aright, if they will be guided. He
is good and wise beyond his years, and so unselfish."
"The three will be manageable enough, for they love him. My only fear is for
Gertrude, and I dread her influence over the rest."
It seemed strange and sad that at such a time Mrs. Whitmore's thoughts
should be disturbed by anxiety about her eldest daughter, and that her whole
trust should be placed on the only one of her husband's children who was not
also her very own son.
It was evident that Richard Whitmore read a story of hidden trouble in his
mother's face, for, after her arms released him, he noted that the glad look
called forth by his assurance had faded, and given place to a different
expression. There was something yet unsaid, and he asked her, gently, "What
is it, dear mother?"
"You read me like a book almost, Dick. I have been hesitating whether to say
any more or no, but it is due to your goodness that I should withhold no
thought from you which has relation to your sisters. Indeed, I have no wish to
do it. My anxiety is on Gertrude's account. She has never been like the rest,
especially to you, and never treated you as she ought to have done since that
miserable visit. When I am gone it may be that she will try to prejudice the
younger ones, and that they will listen to her, and then—"
Tears began to flow down the wan cheeks, and the speaker was unable to
continue.
"I know all, and I have no fear. We will not trouble ourselves about 'maybes,'"
returned Richard, in a cheery, hopeful tone, though he was not wholly without
forebodings on the same account.
"Do not think I have made my promise to you without asking for help to enable
me to keep it. That is enough for to-day. As future days pass one by one into
the present, I shall seek strength for each as it comes. Let this thought comfort
you, dear mother, when you are inclined to remember how young I am to
undertake such a responsibility. Say to yourself, 'Dick does not stand alone.
His father's God is his God also, and trusting in Him for strength according to
his day, he can never be desolate or in doubt as to the course he should
take.'"
"May that God bless you abundantly, my dear boy!" replied Mrs. Whitmore,
fervently. "As I lie here weak and helpless, I feel that if I had only you to thank
Him for, my heart would be filled with gratitude. He took my only boy, but left
me one of the best of sons in you. I cannot fret or trouble about the future. It
seems to me that in the solemn last days of life a clearer understanding of our
Father's dealings with us is vouchsafed, to make up for the fading away of
earthly interests. I see how kindly I have been dealt with through ten years of
widowhood, and how I have been spared till the youngest of the girls is past
mere childhood, and you are grown old enough for them to look up to as
brother, guardian, friend."
Richard answered by a few more loving words, and then, after tenderly kissing
his stepmother, left her to rest.
Mrs. Whitmore might well think much of Dick, and he of her in return. She was
the only mother he could remember, having become his father's second wife
when the boy was barely three years old.
She had come to the home a fair young creature, who had, happily for herself
and the child, been brought up in an atmosphere of love, and was ready to
pour a whole wealth of affection upon little Dick.
From the very day that she entered Mr. Whitmore's house as his wife, she
brightened the life of her tiny stepson in every possible way. She was so
young herself—very little over twenty—and to Dick, who had been under the
charge of a faithful but somewhat prim nurse, her lovely face was like that of
an angel.
The loss of her first baby, the only boy born of this second marriage, drew the
loving bonds between her husband's child and herself closer still. It was such
a comfort to feel his little arms round her neck, to have him for her companion,
and to hear his childish prattle as he coaxed her out into the garden and
fields, and persuaded her to join again in his baby games, as she did before
the little one came and went.
Dick was only six years old when Gertrude, the eldest of the girls, was born,
so that there was no great difference between his age and theirs, and all
seemed to belong to one family on both sides. A looker-on could not have
distinguished which of the five was Mrs. Whitmore's own child, either when all
were little ones, or when they were comparatively grown-up.
Before Mr. Whitmore brought his second wife home, he had wisely explained
to her his position and that of Dick with regard to the property on which they
lived.
"Most of it came with my wife," he said, "and will eventually go to the boy,
though while I live two-thirds of the income from the estate will be mine. Until
he is of age, the whole of it passes through my hands, though, of course, a
liberal portion is to be expended on his maintenance and education. When
Richard is twenty-one, he will have a third for his own absolute use and until
my death, when all his mother's property will be his. As his future is thus
amply provided for, all that I have shall be yours for life, if you survive me, and
afterwards go to our children, if we have others beside Dick. It will not be
much in comparison, but would keep you in a modest way."
Pretty Amy Christie had been accustomed to simple surroundings, and was
willing to trust her future in the hands of Mr. Whitmore. She was transplanted
to a luxurious home, but as she looked around her, from the first she
accustomed herself to think, "We owe the greater part of the good things we
enjoy to little Dick's mother, and they are really held in trust for the boy."
There was no envious feeling in Mrs. Whitmore's mind as she thought of this.
On the contrary, she rejoiced that the boy whom she had been privileged to
train was daily developing into a noble character: true, loving, brave, unselfish.
A little too quiet if anything, save to those who had the key to his inmost heart;
and perhaps even more than to the father whom he loved and reverenced, did
Richard Whitmore reveal it to his stepmother.
He was only sixteen when his father died, and the four girls were mere
children: Gertrude ten, Mina (short for Wilhelmina) eight, Josephine six, and
Florence Mary, or Molly, as everybody called her, only four.
With Mr. Whitmore's death went a large portion of the income, to accumulate
and make Dick richer still, when he should come of age. What the husband
had the power to bequeath to his widow seemed a mere pittance in
comparison with what had been spent on the household, though he had saved
out of it and left a little nest-egg, in the shape of ready money thus
accumulated, absolutely to his widow.
The father had faith in Dick, though he was but a lad of sixteen, and to him, he
commended his still young stepmother and the girls.
The trustees consented that Dick's home should still be shared by them, and
made a liberal allowance. The ready money alluded to helped to tide over the
time until he came of age, so that the interval was passed without much
change in the surroundings of Mrs. Whitmore and her children. Only there was
one unfortunate incident, which helped to spoil the perfect unity which had
hitherto subsisted in the little family.
When Gertrude was about seventeen, she paid a visit to the home of a
schoolfellow who lived at no very great distance. Whilst there, and as the girls
strolled in the sweet spring sunshine, exchanging confidences, Gertrude's
friend began to talk to her of the home she had lately left.
"I think Mere Side is just the most charmingly-situated house, and altogether
the loveliest spot I ever saw. I always envied you your home until I knew."
"Knew what?" asked Gertrude, turning sharply round with an expression of

utter astonishment on her handsome face. It was reflected on that of her
friend, Pauline Tindall, who had spoken without having an idea that she was
trenching on forbidden ground.
"You must know what I mean, dear," she replied, "and surely you are not
angry at me for alluding to it. I would not pain or annoy you for the world," and
she clung coaxingly to Gertrude, who was a full head above her in height.
"I do not understand you. I was surprised, not angry, when you said those
words, 'until I knew,' and I want to know the meaning of them also. Tell me,
Pauline, if you are really my friend!"
"If! Oh, Gertrude, can you doubt me? I am and shall always be your true
friend, I hope. It is impossible that you should not know already far more than I
can tell. I was only thinking that if Mr. Richard—I should say Mr. Whitmore
now, as he is the only gentleman in the family—were to marry, how sad it
would be for you all. If I lived at Mere Side on the same terms, I should be
haunted with a perpetual dread of receiving notice to gait, and should feel as if
a sword were hanging over my head whenever my brother spoke to a girl."
Still there was a look of perplexity and bewilderment on Gertrude Whitmore's

face, and at last it dawned on her friend's mind that facts which were known to
all the country round must be unknown to her.
It was perfectly true. No outsider had ever spoken to these Whitmore girls
about the difference between Dick's worldly circumstances and their own.
Everybody knew that the main portion of the money and the whole of the
estate had come by Dick's mother, and that Mr. Whitmore had only a life
interest in these. Of course, all had belonged to the young man himself since
he came of age, and that was two years ago, when Gertrude was fifteen.
And everybody took it for granted that what was so generally known outside
was equally so to the young people who lived so comfortably with stepbrother
Dick. It was of no use alluding to such matters. The girls were happy and well
cared for, and Richard Whitmore was the best of sons to his charming
stepmother, and of brothers to the quartet of bonnie lasses at Mere Side. No
doubt they would marry in good time, or if he married, he would do something
towards increasing the slender income of one to whom he gave a son's
affection.
If outsiders failed to speak of the position, Richard Whitmore was still less
likely to name it. It was this lad of sixteen, who, when his father died, had
gone quietly to the trustees, that father's old friends, and pleaded with them
for the largest allowance that they dared take the responsibility of granting
during his minority. Not for himself, but that Mrs. Whitmore might not want any
luxury to which she had been accustomed, or the girls feel that a needless
shadow had fallen on their young lives.
It was Richard who had said to the mother, "Do not be afraid of spending from
your own store. It will be replenished in due time," meaning when he should
have legal power to do what he chose with his own. And, lastly, it was he who
had persuaded Mrs. Whitmore to keep the girls in ignorance of what they
owed to him.
"We are children of the same parents, for you are the only mother I can
remember," he said to her. "Do not let them think that Fortune has made any
difference in the shares she has severally allotted to us. Why should they
know? I am not likely to marry for years and years to come, if ever, and what
would my home be, without the girls and you?"
So it was Dick's doing that Gertrude first listened in such amazement to

Pauline Tindall's sympathetic remarks, and then insisted on an explanation.
"Then, from what you tell me, I am to understand that my sisters and I are to a
great extent dependent on Richard. That, but for him, we must live in some
little poky place with one, or at most two servants, if indeed we could afford so
much. That I, but for my—" she had always said brother before
—"stepbrother's generosity—is that the right word, Pauline?—would have to
go out as a governess, or companion, or something of the kind."
"I did not say so, dear Gertrude. I never dreamed of such a thing. I only
alluded to what I thought you knew as well as myself. Mr. Richard is good and
generous, splendidly generous. Everybody says so, and I should think that the
very fact of your having no knowledge of what he has done, will show you
what a delicate mind he must have."
There was a hard, set look on Gertrude's face as she answered, "True,
Pauline, you said nothing of the going out as a governess, or the
consequences which might follow if Richard Whitmore were to marry. But you
showed me plainly enough that, were he to bring home a wife, there would no
longer be room for the rest of us under his roof. The remainder of the blanks
were easy to fill in, and my imagination did that quickly enough."
Again Pauline spoke soothingly and tenderly to her friend. She felt that she
had unwittingly done mischief, and was distressed beyond measure at the
impression produced on Gertrude. She pleaded again that she could not have
imagined that she was touching on a forbidden subject, when it was one so
well-known. That it was her own enthusiastic admiration for Mere Side, which
had made her express what would be her feelings were she in Gertrude's
place, at the very possibility of having to leave it.
Then she added, "Knowing how often you have spoken of your brother in such
affectionate terms, and that he is honoured and respected by everyone, I
thought you would love to know how his beautiful unselfishness is spoken of."
"I suppose I should appreciate it too in somebody else," replied Gertrude,

trying to repress her angry feelings, or to prevent their being noticed. "But it
has been a rude awakening for me. I have lived in a dream of comforts,
luxuries, beautiful surroundings, to a share of which I thought I had as good a
personal right as anyone who enjoyed them with me. I have been shaken out
of my pleasant sleep to find that I can claim only a share in a mere pittance,
and that I am a species of genteel pauper—a dependant on the charity of my
stepbrother."
Poor Pauline! She attempted no further explanations. She was a little, tender,
clinging creature, but withal an enthusiastic admirer of all that was generous
or noble. Richard Whitmore's had seemed to her one of the most beautiful and
unselfish of characters—a hero to be worshipped, though he was not
externally suggestive of one.
Now she had done harm, both to Gertrude and to him. She was overwhelmed
with distress, and, unable to think of anything else to say or do, she sat down
and cried bitterly.
This was more than Gertrude bargained for when she used such harsh words,
and now she found herself compelled to try and comfort Pauline.
"Dry your tears, you dear little thing," she said. "Pray do not take my hasty
words for more than they are worth. Of course I was annoyed at first. Who
would not be when they felt what they had looked on as firm ground crumbling
away beneath their feet? It was a shock to me to hear such news for the first
time, but no doubt Dick is the finest, dearest old darling in the world, and the
best of brothers. Have I not cause to say so?"
"Oh, I am so glad you are not angry, and that you are taking things rightly,
Gertrude. You make me quite frightened. But I understand. It was likely you
should feel surprised, even angry, at the first look, as it were. Promise now
that you will not repeat what I have said, but let all pass as if you had never
heard it."
The childlike pleading tone and tearful eyes drew a smile from the stronger-
minded girl. She put her arm caressingly round Pauline, and said, "I will
promise not to say a word more about this matter until to-morrow morning,
and then only to you. And you must promise that you will not repeat either my
hasty expressions or anything that we have been talking about, until the same
time."
Pauline promised gladly enough, and then retreated to her own room to try
and remove the traces of tears, which were only too visible.
Gertrude walked slowly backwards and forwards in the grounds for some time
before she returned to the house. Then the sound of the dressing bell reached
her, and she went in to prepare for dinner. It was not often that she was
betrayed into such an exhibition of feeling, and she was now angry at herself
for not having shown more self-control. She wanted time to think over what
she had heard, and it was for that purpose she had given to, and obtained
from, Pauline the promise that, until the next day, no allusion should be made
to the subject which had so agitated her.
For a girl of seventeen, Gertrude had no small amount of worldly wisdom.

People said that Miss Whitmore had great individuality of character, she
thought and decided so largely for herself, and often got her own way by dint
of steady determination. And it was a remarkable fact that whilst each of the
younger sisters had her pet name, and were Mina, Jo, and Molly, no one
would ever have presumed to call the eldest Gerty.
CHAPTER II.
"SILENCE IS GOLDEN."
GERTRUDE went early to bed that evening. She wanted to think over her
conversation with Pauline, and felt that for such a purpose there could be
nothing like the quiet of her own room. She was, beside, of an eminently
practical turn of mind, and had no desire to look weary and hollow-eyed on the
morrow, when there was to be a picnic specially got up in her honour, as the
guest of the Tindalls.
"I am just a little tired," she said to Mrs. Tindall, "and as I want to look my best
and be ready for any amount of rambling, I will say good-night now."
"This is very early, my dear, but I am sure you are wise, and Pauline will do
well to follow your example. If only young people would believe it, there is no
better preserver of good looks than early hours," replied Mrs. Tindall.
Gertrude assented, and managed to get her thinking done soon enough to
allow of some "beauty sleep." She came down in the morning in a charming
but simple dress, looking as gay and bright as though nothing had occurred to
disturb her on the preceding day.
She was especially affectionate to Pauline, and answered her friend's

inquiring look with a frank smile. A little later, amid the bustle of preparation for
starting, she whispered in her friend's ear, "Pauline, I was very cross and
stupid yesterday. I took an altogether wrong view of things. Forgive my ill-
tempers, darling, and, if you can, forget them, as I want to forget what caused
them."
Pauline's face brightened. "I am so glad," she replied. "I felt quite distressed
last night, because I had been the cause of the trouble. I never meant it. I
could not have guessed that you—"
"Hush, darling!" and Gertrude placed her hand playfully on Pauline's lips. "Do
not let us go over the ground again. The only thing I ask is that you will not
say another word about it. You could only suppose I knew all as well as
yourself. I understand the kindness which kept my position and that of the girls
at home a secret from ourselves. I was a very naughty child, and you the
sweet, sympathetic little friend you always are."
"And shall you not say a word at home—I mean to your mother, or Mr.
Richard?"
"Not a word. I decided last night, before I went to sleep even, that since my
mother and stepbrother had not chosen to speak about money matters,
neither would I. Do you not think I may be well content to go on as I have
hitherto done, enjoying the good things of this world without troubling to ask
myself who paid for them?"
"I think so, Gertrude, dear—that is, in one sense. When the good things are
given by such a kind hand as that of your brother, there can be no painful
feeling of obligation in taking. I do believe he is just one of those whose 'heart
grows rich in giving,' and that he delights in making everybody happy—most
of all his mother and sisters."
"My mother, not his, really," replied Gertrude.
"That makes it all the nicer, does it not? Who could tell that they were not
really mother and son? Why think about the fact at all, when he so willingly
forgets it, and Mrs. Whitmore loves him as her own? Do you know, Gertrude,
you called him your 'stepbrother' to-day. I never heard you use the term
before, and to me it sounded horribly harsh, seeing you are all children of one
father."
"Did I?" replied Gertrude. "Ah, well, only one heard it; and, if you please, we
will now have done with this matter, once and for all. Mrs. Tindall is wanting
our help. It is shocking to desert her, even for a few moments."
Gertrude hastened to offer her assistance in packing some sweets which

required careful handling, and soon she and the rest of the party were on their
way to the place selected for the picnic.
Never had Pauline seen her friend more apparently gay and light-hearted, and
the girl rejoiced that the impression produced by her unfortunate allusions had
already passed away. She was, however, mistaken.
Gertrude did not, and could not, forget. Through that day and after came
again and again the haunting thought, "I am only a pensioner on Richard's
bounty. Only one of the second wife's children—the portionless wife of a man
who had little to leave for her and his daughters. It is plain what people think.

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Energy Culture: Work, Power, and Waste

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Reds in Blue: UNESCO, World Governance, and the Soviet

Revealing Schemes: The Politics of Conspiracy in Russia

Media and Communication in the Soviet Union

Russia, the Former Soviet Republics, and Europe Since

The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and

Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the

The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia #7) The Soviet

Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union

Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment

Credit line: the_burtons / Getty Images

This volume grew out of a colloquium called “Energy Aesthetics: Force,

Polina Dimova is Assistant Professor of Russian Language, Literature,

Meghan Vicks is the author of Narratives of Nothing in Twentieth-­

Fig. 1.1 Alexandre Michon, “Oil Fountain of the Gorny

Fig. 8.7 Cover image of E. Shabad, USSR: North, East, South,

Introduction: Energy Culture in Russia

Jillian Porter and Maya Vinokour

Climate change is transforming humanity’s relationship with energy. Even

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

t­ echnologically advanced nations with ever more energy would jeopardize

close relationships among culture, politics, and the environment.7

motion of particles, which can in turn be harnessed to produce mechanical

concept of labor power from the German physicist Hermann von

worldview in general, but contemporary energy science in particular

lifetime marked by hairpin ideological turns. Gorky’s ability to seamlessly

aesthetic features in Soviet and post-Soviet literature and cinema.27 Such

narrative mobilized two generations of Russian revolutionaries and signifi-

Chapters 4 and 5 analyze the aesthetics of a single source or form of

laboratories of future societal organization. Thinkers like Lev Tolstoy,

patriotic discourse of the Putin era attempts an ideological reproduction

nuclear energy.32 While other contributors explore the products of Russian

The Energy of Chernyshevsky’s Vera

One of the more provocative questions in Chernyshevsky’s central philo-

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

from the teleological projections toward the Russian Revolution. In order

Cultural Signposts of Popular Science

In the context of such overarching popular-scientific claims, Turgenev’s

Progressive journalists’ emphasis on popular science encouraged read-

The Scientistic Framework of What Is to Be Done?

to the process that organizes atoms in motion. In an early instance, the

They repeatedly embraced their sister, showered thanks on Mrs. Worsley in

The young face brightened again at these words.

"I thought I was going home with you, aunty."

"To Broadlands! You cannot mean it?"

Arthur mentally dissented from Mrs. Worsley's statement that Nettie

"Kiss me, dear Dick."

"Knew what?" asked Gertrude, turning sharply round with an expression of

Still there was a look of perplexity and bewilderment on Gertrude Whitmore's

So it was Dick's doing that Gertrude first listened in such amazement to

"I suppose I should appreciate it too in somebody else," replied Gertrude,

For a girl of seventeen, Gertrude had no small amount of worldly wisdom.

She was especially affectionate to Pauline, and answered her friend's

"My mother, not his, really," replied Gertrude.

Gertrude hastened to offer her assistance in packing some sweets which

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Meghan Vicks is the author of Narratives of Nothing in Twentieth-

t echnologically advanced nations with ever more energy would jeopardize