Chapter three tracks the geographical expansion of the legal reform, exploring the debates and negotiations around its implementation in Crimea and Kazan. In order to better contextualize this implementation, it first discusses the changing political climate after the Great Reforms and the limited politicization of the emerging public sphere, which also affected provincial cities such as Kazan. Pragmatic concerns over resources and infrastructure came to play as important a role as political and ideological concerns over power and authority. The chapter shows that the reform had to be negotiated carefully at the provincial and local levels, with occasional clashes disrupting the process, as a range of individuals and institutions advanced their positions and defended specific interests. In charting these negotiations and controversies, the chapter also paints a detailed ethnographic portrait of communication and administrative interaction in post-reform Russia.

The Coda draws out the book’s main arguments and points out further research avenues opened by its reassessment of aesthetic autonomy both for the study of Stevens and for current debates in new modernist studies. It highlights the relevance of the problem of autonomy to considerations of modernisms’ cultural and spatial expansions worldwide, a development that has come to occupy a center stage in contemporary critical debates in modernist studies. The social and political dimensions of autonomy suggest further lines of inquiry that prove relevant to the new critical and methodological approaches modernist studies have developed in recent decades. The concluding section argues that reexamining the various meanings of modernist autonomy from a culturally and geographically expanded angle might reveal multiple transnational histories of autonomy with a potential to enhance our understanding of global modernisms, including specific reference to Stevens’ poetics.