Image of Istanbul in the Russian émigré, Soviet, and modern Russian-language literature

Resumo

The article “The Image of Istanbul in the Russian Émigré, Soviet, and Modern Russian-Language Literature” explores various facets of the city’s image through the lens of the short stories and essays of the first wave of Russian émigrés’ literature, Soviet literary work of the 1920s-1930s, and contemporary Russian-language Azerbaijani prose. Literary works by Nadezhda Teffi Istanbul and the Sun (1921) and Gaito Gazdanov A Weak Heart (1927) explored in the article, focus on the émigré experience representing two most common ways of depicting Istanbul among the Russian émigré writers. Teffi neither succumbs to Orientalist fantasy nor reduces the city to a refugee misery, she supports both notions and considers Istanbul to be the city of exiles’ humiliation and artistic transcendence, whereas Gazdanov interprets the first center of Russian emigration more clearly and tragically, depicting it as a symbol of life without any moral support. Soviet literature portrays Istanbul in an entirely different manner. During the 1920s-1930s, the description of the East was ideologically justified as it implicitly prepared the ground for developing the internationalist theme of “the friendship of peoples”. Thus, Soviet writers focused mainly on the political, social, and cultural changes which occurred in Turkey during the 1920s, highlighting the country’s transformation from a historical enemy to potential ally. Sweet Salt of the Bosphorus (2008) by a contemporary Azerbaijani author Elchin Safarli who takes into account the artistic experience of Russian émigrés, creates a transcultural space that exhibits the following features of transliterary writing: the author’s specific bilingual linguistic consciousness, the reconstruction of an Azerbaijani worldview through the Russian language, an interlinguistic textual field, the foregrounding of the cultural integration of Russians in the East and an objective reconstruction by the writer, who belongs to the Eastern cultural code, of a “Russian” perspective on the world.