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ABSTRACT
This article relates literary and journalistic representations of Riga’s historic Russophone neighborhood, the Moskоvskii forshtadt, to the interwar conversation on the future of ‘Russia’ outside of the Soviet Union. My analysis begins with a close reading of Georgii Ivanov’s sketch, ‘Moskovskii Forshtadt.’ I then contrast Ivanov’s sketch with local Latvian Russophone accounts of the forshtadt, published in the Riga newspapers Segodnya and Segodnya vecherom. In studying representations and discourses, I reveal how the discursive space generated by the forshtadt contains three different understandings of Russian nationhood in its diasporic, extraterritorial existence of the interwar period.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Ilya Vinitsky, Ekaterina Pravilova, Nataļja Šroma, and Boris Ravdin for their assistance and encouragement.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Both Ivanov and Odoevtseva fled Soviet Russia in 1922 and eventually settled in Paris.
2. All translations are my own unless otherwise specified.
3. Along with Vadim Kreid, I locate Ivanov’s story in the fiziologicheskii ocherk (physiological sketch) lineage as popularized in Russia in the 1840s by Nikolai Nekrasov and Vissarion Belinskii (Kreid Citation2007, 272–273). For an overview of the sketch genre, see Schillinger (Citation1985, 337–338).
4. Simon Franklin has theorized the graphosphere as ‘the space of the visible word’ (Franklin Citation2019, especially 1–18). The political significance of the entire ‘linguistic landscape,’ which in the urban context includes street signage as well as oral speech pronounced and heard by passersby, plays an important role in Ivanov’s discursive construction (Franklin Citation2019, 9).
5. Segodnya contributors include Boris Nikolaevich Shalfeev (nom de plume: B. Pomorskii), I. E. Gutman (A. B. V), V. V. Tret’yakov (V. T.), and K. A. Verkhovskaya (Tabu) (Abyzov Citation2001, 384–387). I will refer to these authors by their birth names when discussing their reportage.
6. Newer arrivals include journalists associated with Meduza (Medusa), Novaya gazeta (The New Gazette), and Dozhd’ (Rain). On Meduza’s ‘Russo-centric transnationalism,’ see Strukov (Citation2020).
7. From the German: vorstadt meaning a neighborhood outside of a city or large settlement; a suburb.
8. On Riga’s demographics in 1935, see Feigmane (Citation2000, 9).
9. The forshtadt was the site of the Riga Ghetto, beginning in 1941.
10. Rubins (Citation2015, 3–4) summarizes the major statements of the preservationist mission in Russian Montparnasse.
11. Studies of popular, nonliterary cultural forms have recently increased, as exemplified by Natalie Zelensky’s Performing Tsarist Russia in New York, a monograph studying ‘the sphere of Russian popular music production surrounding the First Wave Russian community in New York from the 1920s until the present day’ (Zelensky Citation2019, 4; see also Senelick Citation2019).
12. See, for instance, Khodasevich’s 1923 poem, ‘Ya rodilsya v Moskve … ’ (I was born in Moscow …), in which Khodasevich packs up his Russianness into the collected works and letters of Aleksandr Pushkin: ‘No: vosem’ tomikov, ne bol’she, –/I v nikh vsya rodina moya;’ also, ‘A ya s soboi svoyu Rossiyu/V dorozhnom unoshu meshke’ (But eight little volumes, no more than that –/And in them is my entire motherland; And I carry my Russia/With me in a traveler’s pack). On this poem’s role in the creation of Khodasevich’s Pushkin-centered Russianness, see Panova (2020–2021).
13. Raeff (Citation1990, 198) emphasizes the ‘exiled minority’s dual role of preserver and contributor to the common fund of a national culture.’
14. The first of three publications in Poslednie novosti under the title ‘Moskovskii forshtadt’ appeared on 8 January 1934; this will be my focus. Ivanov’s subsequent forshtadt-related publications in Poslednie novosti (2 March 1934 and 17 August 1934) comprise the plot-motivated portion of ‘Moskovskii forshtadt.’ An investigation of the division and interaction between description and narrative falls outside the bounds of this paper.
15. On ‘the language problem’ in interwar Latvia, see Feigmane (Citation2000, 103–127).
16. For example, ‘The dim streetlamps, placed apart from one another by almost a verst, scarcely illuminate the empty, black-snow colored street.’
17. Ivanov is excerpting Igor’ Severyanin’s 1909 poem, ‘Vse po-staromu’ (Everything as of old).
18. Lev Tolstoy adopts a similar technique – second-person narration of an urban environment – in his Sevastopol’ Sketches (Tolstoi Citation1935, 3–17). See also the originary and quintessential reflection on the ocherk text in the Russian tradition, Belinskii’s introduction to The Physiology of Saint Petersburg (Belinskii Citation1948).
19. Kreid identifies ‘atmosphere’ as Ivanov’s protagonist in his memoirs and short stories. While ‘atmosphere’ may result from Ivanov’s literary world-creation, I maintain that the chronotope and the characters who populate it are the true objects of Ivanov’s literary attention (Ivanov Citation1992, 15). The poetic techniques present in ‘Moskovskii Forshtadt’ were developed in Ivanov’s Petersburg Winters, a depiction of the Silver Age atmosphere in St. Petersburg with highly idiosyncratic portraits of leading writers and intellectuals, see Ivanov (Citation2016).
20. See Blok (Citation1997, 185). Ivanov praised Blok’s poem in the journal Apollon in 1915 (Blok Citation1997, 957). Decades later, in 1986, Sergei Dovlatov would preface his own diasporic prose work, The Suitcase (1986), with Blok’s verse line as an epigraph.
21. ‘Moskovskii Forshtadt,’ with its evidence of cultural continuity, contrasts with much of Ivanov’s poetry from the early 1930s. His collection Roses (1931) is suffused with nihilism. Ivanov’s lyric persona declares that Russia, the Tsar, and God are dead and buried.
22. Note that Ivanov erroneously renders the second song as ‘Propal ya, mal’chishka.’ Besides Vyal’tseva, the Russian operatic Bass Efim Gilyarov also recorded this romance in the opening decades of the twentieth century.
23. Natal’ya Gryakalova analyzes Ivanov’s tendency toward tsitatnost’ (citationality), a term borrowed from Vladimir Markov (Gryakalova Citation2011, 71–80). Ivanov often quoted Blok in both his poetry and prose.
24. Poslednie novosti had the highest circulation of any émigré daily newspaper in the 1930s, reaching 23,000 readers (Raeff Citation1990, 83).
25. ‘Imperial culture’ in this context features a ‘complex dynamic of civilization-building and colonial negotiation as critical to the identity of Russia and Russian culture as the dominant culture of an empire’ (Byford, Doak, and Hutchings Citation2020, 15). In other words, as evidenced in Ivanov’s mediation of the forshtadt, imperial culture was coded as ‘Russian’ but not exclusive to one particular ethnos.
26. This quotation is taken from Yan Sudrabkaln and his Segodnya article, ‘Russkaya emigratsiya v latyshskom zerkale’ (Russian emigration in the Latvian mirror) (see Sudrabkaln Citation1932). Jānis Sudrabkalns (a nom de plume for Arvīds Peine) was a Latvian writer, poet, and translator. He is here summarizing and evaluating an article by another Latvian writer and translator, Yulii Roze, published in the January 1932 issue of the Latvian journal Daugava.
27. The Russian writer and humorist Teffi (Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya) wrote the following to the editor of Segodnya on 26 December 1934: ‘Bunin, Zaitsev, Aldanov [luminaries of émigré literature] and I all were in harmonious agreement, that the most interesting Russian newspaper right now is “Segodnya”’ (Fleishman Citation1997, 161).
28. Fleishman revises Raeff’s hierarchy of Russian newspapers in interwar Europe, showing that Segodnya maintained a continent-wide readership long into the 1930s.
29. Note that both Ivanov and Odoevtseva published in Segodnya’s pages in the 1930s. Fleishman et al. (Citation1997, vol. 3, 148–151, 388–394) have published correspondence concerning Ivanov’s publications in Segodnya from 1933 to 1934.
30. The first bus route connecting the forshtadt to the rest of Riga was opened only in 1934 (Grossen Citation1994, 169–192). Grossen describes the interwar forshtadt as follows: ‘This part of the city, with its large number of wooden houses, produces the impression of a Russian back-country town from a distant, shabby province.’ Grossen wrote for a variety of Russophone Latvian newspapers and taught at a Russian secondary school in the forshtadt (Feigmane Citation2022).
31. Tret’yakov was a member of Nikolai Gumilev’s Tsekh poetov (Guild of Poets); he was also active in modernist art circles in both pre-Bolshevik St. Petersburg and interwar Riga.
32. Isidor Efimovich Gutman (Khaimovich), born in the Latvian coastal city of Liepāja in 1900, was a regular Segodnya vecherom writer who began publishing soon after the evening edition’s founding in 1923 (Abyzov Citation2001, 384; Parkhomovskii Citation2015, 7).
33. ‘The Russian quickly adapts to [his] circumstances. Evidence of this is the quick growth in knowledge of the state language [Latvian]’ (Pomorskii Citation1929).
34. The conclusion of Shalfeev’s piece reads like an advertisement: ‘And how to wash yourself in these banyas, as well as what sort of mores are there, well, it’s difficult to relate – you need to see it for yourself … ’ (Pomorskii Citation1925b).
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Benjamin Joseph Musachio
Benjamin Joseph Musachio is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. He has previously published on the history of Russian literary culture in Latvia in Rizhskii al’manakh (Riga Almanac) (2020) and The Russian Review (October 2022). His scholarly interests include Russophone Latvian literature, émigré literature, Soviet-American literary relations, and twentieth-century Russian poetry.