Alexander Pushkin in Bessarabia: literature and identity politics in the periphery^*

* I have previously discussed some aspects of this article in an essay ‘Between Muse and Politics: Pushkin Museum-house in Chisinau and the (Un)Making of Heritage’ at the Platzforma web platform; see http://www.platzforma.md/between-muse-and-politics-pushkin-museum-house-in-chisinau-and-the-unmaking-of-heritage/, last modified 30 January 2016.

ABSTRACT

This article aims to determine the mechanism of heritage-making in a borderland in the European periphery. It aims to reveal a bond between heritage making and the politics of identity. The case study is the memory about the three-year exile of Pushkin in Bessarabia, a southern region of the Russian Empire. The article covers how Pushkin steadily became a significant symbolic resource in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I argue that every time the borderland changed its rulers, along with nationality policies, the memory of Pushkin’s exile was subjected to preferred means of identity politics towards local population.

KEYWORDS:

• Periphery
• identity politics
• high-brow literature
• Bessarabia
• heritage making
• Alexander Pushkin

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers at the National Identities for their valuable comments and careful reading of the manuscript. I express my deepest gratitude to Frieda Fuchs and Christopher Keegan for proofreading this article.

Notes on contributor

Anastasia Felcher is an independent scholar who lives and works in St. Petersburg, Russia. She holds a PhD degree in Management and Development of Cultural Heritage, gained in 2016 at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. She studied history at the Central European University in Budapest and anthropology at University High Anthropological School in Chisinau. She has published in East European Jewish Affairs and European Review of History. She is primarily interested in heritage of minorities in plural societies, dilemmas of Jewish heritage in the post-Holocaust age, museum-making in European peripheries, and literature and politics in East European borderlands.

ORCID

Anastasia Felcher http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4935-2846

Notes

* I have previously discussed some aspects of this article in an essay ‘Between Muse and Politics: Pushkin Museum-house in Chisinau and the (Un)Making of Heritage’ at the Platzforma web platform; see http://www.platzforma.md/between-muse-and-politics-pushkin-museum-house-in-chisinau-and-the-unmaking-of-heritage/, last modified 30 January 2016.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Russian Science Foundation [grant number 17-18-01589].