The Biographies of Urban-Rural Move and the Rhetoric of Self-Transformation in Present-Day Russia

Abstract

The article examines Internet diaries kept by those who have moved from cities to rural areas. It focuses on the issue of popularity and usability of the idiom of urban-rural shift among the Russian urbanites. I argue that the automedial diaries, which are produced with the help of various web applications, may be interpreted as modern forms of subjectivation that allow people to make or refashion their own Self through telling the history of their self-transformation in terms of the move from the megapolis to the village. Biographies of the move remain popular even in those cases when their authors do not intend to engage in farming and spend most of their time in the city. I discuss the rhetoric of urban-rural move in the context of postmodern nomadism, therapeutic narratives, and ideology of the self. The article is drawn both on online research and on fieldwork conducted in 2019–2020.