:How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie.(Studies of the Harriman Institute: Selected Titles in Russian Literature and History.)

In the preface to her new book, Emily D. Johnson describes how, in the early 1990s, while working as a translator, interpreter, and occasional tour guide in St. Petersburg, she became fascinated with the wave of old guidebooks, reprinted by Russian publishers, that were turning up in bookshops and street stands throughout the city. That initial interest broadened into a dissertation and now a monograph focusing on the emergence and evolution of kraevedenie (local or regional studies) as an “identity discipline” with a theoretical center in St. Petersburg. Johnson's stated purpose in the work is to “trace the history of kraevedenie, looking both at how meanings of the term have changed over time and at the role that Petersburg-based scholars and institutions played in the evolution of the discipline.” Further, she sets out to “examine the way in which experts in local studies have traditionally understood and used guidebooks, consider the significance of kraevedenie within Russian society today, and draw … comparisons between this field of inquiry and other Russian and Western knowledge systems” (p. xii).