Shredding the Map: Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia, 1914–1922

Clowes, Edith W.

doi:doi:10.3998/mpub.14378050

Shredding the Map: Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia, 1914–1922

Edith W. Clowes

Open Access

Overview
Contents

Shredding the Map investigates Russian place consciousness in the decade between the start of World War I and the end of the Russian civil war. Attachment to place is a vital aspect of human identity, and connection to homeland, whether imagined or real, can be especially powerful. Drawing from a large digital database of period literature, Shredding the Map investigates the metamorphic changes in how Russians related to places—whether abstractions like “country” or concrete spaces of borders, fronts, and edgelands—during these years.

An innovative, digitally-aided study of Russia’s “imagined geography” during the early decades of the twentieth century, Shredding the Map uncovers vying emotional patterns and responses to Russian ideas of place, some familiar and some quite new. The book includes new visualizations that connect otherwise invisible networks of shared place, feeling, and perception among dozens of writers in order to trace patterns of geospatial identity. A scholarly companion to the “Mapping Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia” website and database, this book offers an innovative analysis of place and identity beyond the centers of power, enhancing our perceptions of Russia and encouraging debate about the possibilities for digital humanities and literary analysis.

"Shredding the Map is an exciting project that uses a creative mix of geographical, network, and linguistic analysis...this book will provide a wonderful model for future digital work in the Slavic field."
—Seth Bernstein, University of Florida

“Shredding the Map shows how a combination of digital humanities and traditional scholarship, of distant and close reading can work.”
—Schamma Schahadat, professor of Slavic literature and cultures at the University of Tübingen

Edith W. Clowes holds the Brown-Forman Chair in the Humanities in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia, where she teaches Russian language, literature, and culture, and Czech literature and film. She is author or editor of fifteen books, volumes, and special journal numbers, including Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity (Cornell, 2011; Russian translation, 2020), and, with Shelly Jarrett Bromberg, the volume Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, Place, Identity (Northern Illinois University Press, 2016).

An auto-narrated audiobook is available via the "Download" button above.

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Published: 2024

Publisher: Amherst College Press

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ISBN(s)

978-1-943208-78-4 (open access)
978-1-943208-77-7 (paperback)

Subject

Resources

Open external resource at http://maprr.iath.virginia.edu

Mapping Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia 1914-1922

Website and Database for Mapping Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia 1914-1922

The appendix offers to interested readers a guide to generating and interpreting maps and graphs using analytical tools available on the MAPRR website.

Guide to Generating MAPRR Graphs and Maps

From Appendix

Appendix: A Guide to Generating and Interpreting Maps and Graphs on the MAPRR Website

This force-directed graph (FIG. 1.1) conveys attraction through shared place-based concepts (PBC) and repulsion when no PBC is shared. As such, they evoke emotional groupings.

FIG. 1.1 Author networks based on shared place-based concepts

From Chapter 1

Figure 1.1 Author networks based on shared place-based concepts.

This tripartite graph of both tsarist and nationalist feelings about a place (FIG. 1.9) shows that the “multivalent marker” tags (beyond the tsarist threesome of Rus, motherland, and fatherland), gain greater importance, for example, the idea of country (strana) and many geographical featuresmountains, rivers, lakes, as well as more human settlementscities, towns, and villages. Nationalists appear to think and care more than tsarists about places internal to Russia.

FIG. 1.9 Tsarist and nationalist authors: their shared feelings and places

From Chapter 1

Figure 1.9 Tsarist and nationalist authors: their shared feelings and places.

Geographical map showing the Russian western front in summer, 1916.

FIG. 1.11 Russian western front, summer, 1916 (Wikimedia).

From Chapter 1

Figure 1.11 Russian western front, summer, 1916 (Wikimedia).

This force-directed graph (FIG. 1.13) illustrates V. Grets emotional community through shared PBCs (green highlighted blue dots) between Gret (yellow highlighted purple dot in the lower right corner) and other writers.

FIG. 1.13 V. Gret’s emotional community

From Chapter 1

Figure 1.13 V. Gret’s emotional community shown through shared PBCs (green highlighted blue dots) between Gret (yellow highlighted purple dot in the lower right corner) and other writers.

FIG. 1.14 “Symbolic Map of Europe: War-Liberator 1914-1915” (Poster Collection, RU/SU 780, Hoover Institution Library & Archives).

From Chapter 1

Figure 1.14 “Symbolic Map of Europe: War-Liberator 1914–1915” (Poster Collection, RU/SU 780, Hoover Institution Library & Archives).

This force-directed graph (FIG. 1.15) exposes the scattered character of the tsarist emotional community. It highlights self-identifying tsarist writers (marked with red stars), writers whose writing conveys tsarist nationalist imagined geography, and their shared feelings about place (place-based concepts).

FIG. 1.15 Self-identifying tsarists and writers with works conveying tsarist imagined geography

From Chapter 1

Figure 1.15 Self-identifying tsarist writers and writers whose writing conveys tsarist nationalist imagined geography are highlighted here. Highlighting the authors also highlights the PBCs that their writing invokes. Stars show just the five known self-identifying tsarists.

Try as they might, there is no budging the wagon: a 1914 Ekaterinoslav cartoon with Russia pictured as a covered wagon being dragged by Austria, Turkey, and Germany on a map of the East European steppe just north of the Black Sea.

FIG. 2.1. “Try as they might, there is no budging the wagon”: a 1914 Ekaterinoslav cartoon showing Russia as a covered wagon.

From Chapter 2

Figure 2.1 “Try as they might, there is no budging the wagon”: a 1914 Ekaterinoslav cartoon with Russia pictured as a covered wagon being dragged by Austria, Turkey, and Germany on a map of the East European steppe just north of the Black Sea (and since the revolution—Ukraine). (National Library of Finland, received June 9, 2021).

The main point of Figure 4.7 is to exhibit the array of feelings that enhance regionalists' sense of agencycelebration (joy), pride, love, hope, loyaltyand the vast number of geographical places invoked. The places mapped among these regionalist writers, listed in the right-hand column, show an unparalleled variety and detail of place names and types of place.

FIG. 4.7. Regionally identifying authors (left side) and their most common geospatial images (right side) and feelings about those places (center).

From Chapter 4

Figure 4.7 Regionally identifying authors (left side) and their most common geospatial images (right side) and feelings about those places (center).

In Figure 4.15 tsarist mania for Rus, expressed in the first year of World War I, yields in Siberian writing to a detailed Siberian landscape and feelings of pride, repeated for different scales and types of place.

FIG. 4.15. Authors identifying as Siberian regionalists or unknown writers whose textual personae strongly identify with Siberia.

From Chapter 4

Figure 4.15 Authors identifying as Siberian regionalists or unknown writers whose textual personae strongly identify with Siberia.

Maps the complex feelings about place of writers who, though alienated from their homeland, decided to stay in Russia.

FIG. 5.6. Authors who feel alienated against Russia but who decide against emigration.

From Chapter 5

Figure 5.6 Authors who feel alienated from Russia but decide against emigration: Akhmatova, Gumilev, Mandelshtam, and Prishvin.

Bednyi, Krasnoarmeitsy, 1919, p. 39, illustration of airdropping leaflets.

FIG. 6.3. Bednyi, Red Army Soldiers (Krasnoarmeitsy, 1919, p. 39), illustration of airdropping leaflets (Hathi Trust, public domain).

From Chapter 6

Figure 6.3 Bednyi, Krasnoarmeitsy, 1919, p. 39, illustration of airdropping leaflets. No copyright.

FIG. 6.6. Main civil-war battle zones in European Russia, 1918. (Hoodinski, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

From Chapter 6

Figure 6.6 Main civil-war battle zones in European Russia, 1918–1921. Hoodinski, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Spatial images of the new world appearing in Figure 6.9 add substance to Marxs call in Communist Manifesto for proletarians of the world to unite. Bolshevik poems do the verbal work of erasing borders by building worker solidarity and celebrating the world-transforming power of workers.

FIG. 6.9. Spatial images of the “new world” among Bolshevik writers.

From Chapter 6

Figure 6.9 Bolshevik and Proletkult expressions of the “new world.”

FIG. 6.10. Front cover of Demian Bednyi’s book, Red Cossack (Krasnyi kazak, 1919). University of Michigan Libraries.

From Chapter 6

Figure 6.10 Front cover of Bednyi’s book, Red Cossack (Krasnyi kazak, 1919). No copyright.

FIG. 6.11. Ordinary Cossacks being beaten by their ataman (Krasnyi kazak, University of Michigan Libraries, no copyright).

From Chapter 6

Figure 6.11 Ordinary Cossacks being beaten by their ataman (Krasnyi kazak). No copyright.

FIG. 6.12. Red Army soldier welcomes and kisses a White Cossack (Krasnyi kazak, University of Michigan Libraries, no copyright).

From Chapter 6

Figure 6.12 Red Army soldier welcomes and kisses a White Cossack (Krasnyi kazak). No copyright.

Emotional communities congregating around joy at the new order (PBC 102), shared among writers of many different pro-revolutionary and Bolshevik political inclinations.

FIG. 6.16. Emotional communities congregating around “joy at the new order” (PBC 102).

From Chapter 6

Figure 6.16 Emotional communities congregating around “joy at the new order” (PBC 102), shared among writers of many different pro-revolutionary and Bolshevik political inclinations.

FIG. 7.1 Ethnographic map of the Russian Empire, 1912. The Bohdan & Neonila Krawciw Ucrainica Antique Map Collection, Harvard Library.

From Conclusion

Figure 7.1 Ethnographic map of the Russian Empire, 1912. The light-pink shading marks the “Russian” ethnic group. All of today’s Ukrainians and most Belarusians are claimed as “Russian.” The Bohdan & Neonila Krawciw Ucrainica Antique Map Collection, Harvard Library.

Shredding the Map: Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia, 1914–1922

Overview

Contents

Resources

Search and Filter Resources

Limit your search

Mapping Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia 1914-1922

Guide to Generating MAPRR Graphs and Maps

FIG. 1.1 Author networks based on shared place-based concepts

FIG. 1.9 Tsarist and nationalist authors: their shared feelings and places

FIG. 1.11 Russian western front, summer, 1916 (Wikimedia).

FIG. 1.13 V. Gret’s emotional community

FIG. 1.14 “Symbolic Map of Europe: War-Liberator 1914-1915” (Poster Collection, RU/SU 780, Hoover Institution Library & Archives).

FIG. 1.15 Self-identifying tsarists and writers with works conveying tsarist imagined geography

FIG. 2.1. “Try as they might, there is no budging the wagon”: a 1914 Ekaterinoslav cartoon showing Russia as a covered wagon.

FIG. 4.7. Regionally identifying authors (left side) and their most common geospatial images (right side) and feelings about those places (center).

FIG. 4.15. Authors identifying as Siberian regionalists or unknown writers whose textual personae strongly identify with Siberia.

FIG. 5.6. Authors who feel alienated against Russia but who decide against emigration.

FIG. 6.3. Bednyi, Red Army Soldiers (Krasnoarmeitsy, 1919, p. 39), illustration of airdropping leaflets (Hathi Trust, public domain).

FIG. 6.6. Main civil-war battle zones in European Russia, 1918. (Hoodinski, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

FIG. 6.9. Spatial images of the “new world” among Bolshevik writers.

FIG. 6.10. Front cover of Demian Bednyi’s book, Red Cossack (Krasnyi kazak, 1919). University of Michigan Libraries.

FIG. 6.11. Ordinary Cossacks being beaten by their ataman (Krasnyi kazak, University of Michigan Libraries, no copyright).

FIG. 6.12. Red Army soldier welcomes and kisses a White Cossack (Krasnyi kazak, University of Michigan Libraries, no copyright).

FIG. 6.16. Emotional communities congregating around “joy at the new order” (PBC 102).

FIG. 7.1 Ethnographic map of the Russian Empire, 1912. The Bohdan & Neonila Krawciw Ucrainica Antique Map Collection, Harvard Library.

Shredding the Map: Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia, 1914–1922

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FIG. 6.6. Main civil-war battle zones in European Russia, 1918. (Hoodinski, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)