This is a very specific question. I was reading The Uncle's Dream by Dostoyevsky where this mother wants to marry her daughter to an old, supposedly rich, senile prince. The mother argues that her daughter could finally leave their dirty town and go abroad. And the prince also talks about foreign countries a lot. It's like he doesn't even live in Russia.
What was the Russian nobility's situation in this regard? Did they just travel a lot? I'm a bit confused.
I add a short part from the novella:
""You would leave for ever this loathsome little town, so full of sad memories for you; where you meet neither friends nor kindness; where they have bullied and maligned you; where all these—these magpies hate you because you are good looking! You could go abroad this very spring, to Italy, Switzerland, Spain!—to Spain, Zina, where the Alhambra is, and where the Guadalquiver flows—no wretched little stream like this of ours!”"
Edit: Oh, and I should add that the time period I ask about is the second half of the 19th century.
Thank you!
To directly answer your question, while some Russian nobility emigrated, the majority did not in the mid to late 19th century (some did, of course - Pierre Troubetzkoy comes to mind, and he is from a particularly prominent family; and many emigrated between 1917 and 1922). It's more likely that wealthy Russians would spend time in Germany for education or travel to Italy and France as the British elite did. But I can provide a brief overview of what Dostoyevsky is writing about in Uncle's Dream and how it fits into the attitudes of the gentry.
Dostoyevsky is a fascinating writer whose works span huge changes in Russia and, accordingly, the disposition of the nobility. Uncle's Dream was composed after Dostoevsky was imprisoned in Omsk, much earlier than his great novels, and is a playful satire of the rural nobility who seek to aggrandize themselves and sculpt meaning. These nobles are aspirational and status-oriented (in the case of Prince K, somewhat absurdly), and often recall the grandeur of the past that didn't really exist.
The semiotician Yuri Lotman argues that the daily life of Russian nobility was markedly performative, and largely regulated by Petrine reforms and their subsequent iterations. So teasing out the actual impressions of the provincial nobility is quite difficult in relation to Russia or the West. There is a very complex relationship with Europe, as Russians are both repulsed and enchanted by it. The introduction to the Slavophile Ivan Kireevsky's "On the Nature of European Culture and on Its Relationship to Russian Culture" is quite telling:
"...you and I had a long discussion about the nature of European culture and the characteristics that distinguish it from the culture that belonged to Russia in ancient times, traces of which to this day not only can be observed in the customs, manners, and mindset of the common people, but also permeate the soul, the turn of mind, the whole inner content, so to speak, of any Russian who has not yet been transformed by a Western upbringing." source
while in Forefathers' Eve, Adam Mickiewicz mocks Petersburg's appropriated architecture and says "only a devil could raise this pile of rubble." Denis Fonvizin and Karamzin both have excellent travelogues; one invoking Western sentimentalism, the other rebuking both French philosophes and peasantry. Vasily Botkin similarly has a travelogue about his time in Italy, Spain, and France, and it's this tradition of the Grand Tour that Dostoyevsky is satirizing.
Along these same lines of the idle gentry, the delightful literary trope of the superfluous man (лишний человек) captures some of the sentiment of cynical and disenchanted nobility. Although there are some intimations of that, Uncle's Dream predominantly engages the petty and flashy nobles. Well-educated and travelled nobles were not uncommon, particularly after 1881,
The End of Serfdom, Noble Subjects, In the Vanguard of Reform, and Emancipation of Russian Nobility, 1762-1785 all attend to the expectations and attitudes of the nobility and are worth taking a look at.