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Current Trends in Landscape Research pp 41–62Cite as

Landscape Concept in History of Russian (Soviet) Geography

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Part of the book series: Innovations in Landscape Research ((ILR))

Abstract

Our historical review aims to clarify the modern meaning of the term “landscape” in the context of historical evolution of the notion in the twentieth century. A remarkable feature of the history of Russian geography was the coexistence of multiple readings of the term “landscape.” In the 1910s, landscape notion had an important human dimension, whereas Soviet geographers interpreted landscape as a principally natural object. Nor was there ever a monopoly on reading the term “landscape” in the Soviet period. For some Soviet geographers landscapes had definite scale (Solntsev’s landscape) while for many others, the term was applicable for a complex of any scale and rank. For some scientists the terms “landscape” and “geosystem” were synonymous but for others—not. All too often collisions of different interpretations of landscape were a matter of definition. Imperfect argumentation resulted in marginalization of the study of landscape morphology, the most original concept in Soviet geography, and blurring the term. Most modern Russian geographers use the term “landscape” as a synonym of natural complex applicable to units at any spatial scale. The term “geosystem” also is used widely by modern geographers referring in a generalizing and non-selective way to all natural complexes regardless of their spatial scale and rank. For the bulk of modern Russian geographers, the terms “landscape,” “natural complex,” and “geosystem” are loosely interchangeable.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Petri (1892b), the head of the first chair of geography at Saint Petersburg University, wrote that geography could be a successor to the Hegelian philosophical system, which, in his words, had collapsed some time earlier.

  2. 2.

    Systematic sciences also have geographical aspects. For example, as a systematic science economics could investigate spatial aspects of economy. But these two disciplines “geographical economy” and “economical geography” would be, in principle, distinct. The former studies peculiarities of spatial distribution of economic phenomenon, while the latter investigates how the economic phenomena interact with all other natural and human elements in landscapes.

  3. 3.

    Russian geographers first encountered the chorological concept through the publications of Edward Banze (Dronin 1999). Some of the geographers (e.g., Berg) criticized Banze for his “vulgarian–feuilleton” language.

  4. 4.

    Understanding landscape as a scenery [peizazh] was one of the earliest interpretations of landscape notion. As early as in 1905, A. P. Nechaev published a small book Pictures of the Motherland. According to Sukhova (1981), the book was the first publication in Russian geography in which landscape was called as the major subject of geographical science. Nechaev defined landscape as formed by “all objects located on the Earth surface—stones, streams, plants, animals, and humans with diverse results of their activities.” The leading role in formation of scenery was given to geomorphological structure of a site, while vegetation and cultural objects were essential but secondary. In 1908, A. A. Borzov published a book under the similar title Pictures on Geography of Russia. In the preface he stressed that “landscape” could be synonymous with “scenery,” with depictions of smells and sound at sunset (Borzov 1908). The book presented descriptions of 12 regions of European Russia [borrowed from the scheme of Kruber (1898)] with reference to their scenery characteristics. For example, the Central Agricultural Region was described with such language as: “…all contours and colors here are so elegant, so soft, all transitions are so gentle, that only here could have appeared the melancholic and heartfelt poetry of Turgenev and the graceful miniatures of Fet. The month of May is captioned: greeneries are fresh and brighter being washed by recent rain.” (p. 9).

    There was no reflection of this exotic interpretation in Russian geography. For example, in German geography this interpretation of term “landscape” was justified as a positivistic attempt to restrict geographical research to visual subjects thus excluding mental ones like ideas, faiths, morality, etc.

  5. 5.

    In the Moscow State University Geography Department, this structure has changed little since 1929. There are more than dozen chairs in physical geography disciplines (physical geography and landscape study, hydrology, geomorphology, etc.) and a sole chair in economical geography.

  6. 6.

    It is worth to remind that his most important methodological publication of 1905 became acknowledged by Russian geographers only in the early 1910s.

  7. 7.

    It is difficult to understand why Berg (1936) even in the second edition of his textbook Landscape-geographical zones of the USSR repeated obviously inconsistent instances of landscapes: on the one hand, a pine standing with lichen flora as one type of ecosystem, on the other, Valdaj Upland, which was an individual unit (region), very diverse in terms of types of ecosystems.

  8. 8.

    Poles’e is a very large lowland in Belarus, Vasugan’e is an even larger boggy plain in Western Siberia (spreading across three administrative provinces: Tomsk, Novosibirsk, and Omsk).

  9. 9.

    Solntsev renamed micro-landscapes in fatsii and urochishch (as combination of several fatsii) in Russian, denoting a separate terrain with particular features, a word difficult to render literally in English.

  10. 10.

    These examples were given by D. Armand, one of the critics of Solntsev’s “study on morphology of landscape.”

  11. 11.

    Despite recognition that different schemes of regionalization were very different even for the same territory, all authors insisted on the objective character of regionalization and that outlined “regions” exist objectively.

  12. 12.

    This was, to a great extent, a matter of taste. V. N. Solntsev (son N. A. Solntsev), who actively promoted the systems approach, characterized the language of theoretical discussions of older geographers as “tongue-tied” (Solntsev 1977). To some extent, it was a generational conflict (literally, a father/son thing). A. D. Armand (son of D. L. Armand) also considered as an essential property of geosystems their capacity for self-regulation. He also stated that information flow could be taken into account along with energy and matter flow in “geosystems.” However, D. L. Armand criticized renaming of well-known processes in terms of information theory and called on his son personally to call a cat a cat.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Geography, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Leninskie Gory, 119991, Moscow, Russia

    Nikolai M. Dronin

  2. JMF Research Associates, Philadelphia, USA

    John M. Francis

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Correspondence to Nikolai M. Dronin .

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  1. Guest Scientist, Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), Müncheberg, Brandenburg, Germany

    Lothar Mueller

  2. Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), Müncheberg, Brandenburg, Germany

    Frank Eulenstein

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Dronin, N.M., Francis, J.M. (2019). Landscape Concept in History of Russian (Soviet) Geography. In: Mueller, L., Eulenstein, F. (eds) Current Trends in Landscape Research. Innovations in Landscape Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30069-2_2

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