A settler neighbourhood: Samuel Jacob, ‘Nearer Neighbors: Settler Sublimation and Human Gardening in the Russian-American Neighborhood of Crèvecoeur’s Letters From an American Farmer’, American Literary History, 38, 4, 2026, pp. 464-489 | settler colonial studies blog

A settler neighbourhood: Samuel Jacob, ‘Nearer Neighbors: Settler Sublimation and Human Gardening in the Russian-American Neighborhood of Crèvecoeur’s Letters From an American Farmer’, American Literary History, 38, 4, 2026, pp. 464-489

26Oct26

Abstract: Of the twelve letters comprising J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters From an American Farmer (1782), the penultimate eleventh stands out. It is narrated not by the titular Farmer James but by “Iwan,” a Russian gentleman who declares America and Russia “nearer neighbours” (262). This essay recovers the unacknowledged work Russian-American neighborliness performs within Crèvecoeur’s vision of American futurity. I show how Crèvecoeur borrows an eighteenth-century grammar of the neighborhood to both depict and predict Russian and American settler expansion as parallel, even doubled, projects. I further argue that Iwan is not, as he is often interpreted, a continuation of James’s narrational function, but is Crèvecoeur’s historically inflected amalgam of Fedor Karzhavin, a Russian traveler throughout colonial America. Finally, turning to Iwan’s conversations with the botanist John Bartram, I demonstrate how Crèvecoeur uses botanical language to recast slavery and serfdom as benevolent forms of human gardening, a refiguration that sublimates Russia and America’s systems of enslaved labor and indigenous dispossession into shared fictions of cultivation and care. Against the backdrop of contemporary diagnoses of the “Russification” of US government, I show that tracing early American expressions of Russia and America as “nearer neighbors” promises new trajectories for US literary scholarship.

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