An inaugural screed intended to frame a blog is a fitting space in which to exercise the prerogative of levity. Academic blogs such as ours are defined to a large degree by what they are not: peer-reviewed research articles steeped in disciplinary habits of citation and exposition, often at the expense of investigations of lateral affinities or arguments that perforate professional and conceptual boundaries. Laterality and perforation are two keywords and beacons for our meditations here at Spectral Themes; they are not alone.
We also take inspiration from the etymology of the term “blog” itself. Consider the original portmanteau: weblog. The provocative contrast between the two halves of this Internet 1.0 coinage is rarely appreciated. A web is a multicentered, diaphanous entity; its sophisticated synonyms include “rhizome” and “assemblage”. Heterogeneity and multiplicity are its calling cards. A log summons divergent associations. Whether understood as a record of occurrences or, less aptly in this context, as a unit of timber, the log is a sign of homogenization, of the submission of disparate qualities (a congeries of events; grain and hardness) to a single system of enumeration. Examined according to these metaphorical logics, a weblog is an oxymoron: both diverse and uniform, both multipolar and singular. This fits our purposes nicely.
There is a paradoxical aspect to a blog about specters, as well. Ghosts are central to our research group’s endeavors as a whole, as our acronymic name, REVENANT, suggests. We take inspiration from Derrida’s famous meditations on specters: “A ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back.”[1] Eternal returns of the ghosts of empires—specifically, the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov Empires—orient REVENANT’s inquiries, as well as the explorations of our blog. More specifically, we ponder post-imperial persons, post-imperial places, and post-imperial things—the tripartite heuristic for REVENANT’s research, and a theme that I take up at greater length here.
Post-imperial hauntings in Sarajevo’s Eugene of Savoy (Jajce) Barracks. Photo by Jeremy F. Walton.
Beyond these thematic generalities, it is worth tarrying a bit longer with the paradox of writing about specters and revenants. To write for an audience, whether of an academic blog or otherwise, is to render the objects of one’s inquiries and meditations public. How can this act of publicization, with the imperatives of coherence and legibility that define it, possibly capture a ghost? How can the uncanny and the untoward features of haunting persist across the gap between phenomenological and the discursive? Cleary, uncanniness is not merely neutered and neutralized by publicization: ghost stories and horror films tell us otherwise. Yet, if we genuinely aspire to “learn to live with ghosts,”[2] as Derrida proposes, such dilemmas cannot be easily jettisoned. The afterlives of empires, in both their web-like multiplicity and log-like uniformity, demand nothing less.
[1] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Peggy Kamuf, trans. (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 123.
“As soon as roses fade,
Breathing ambrosia,
Their souls are flying,
Lightly to Eylsium.
There, where tired waves
Are bearing oblivion,
Their fragrant shades
Bloom over Lethe.”
--Alexander Pushkin, “To the Fountain of the Palace of Bakhchisarai” [1]
March 20th, 2014, is a date intimately entwined with Alexander Pushkin in my memory. That morning, as I was preparing to board a flight from Istanbul to Zagreb, an unsettling ghost of empire haunted the departures board at Atatürk Airport. Nestled between upcoming flights to Bucharest and Tehran, Toulouse and Lisbon, a scheduled Atlas Jet service to Simferopol, Crimea’s second largest city, simply read “cancelled.” The previous month, Vladimir Putin had ordered the invasion of Crimea in a sinister, irredentist effort to wrest it back from Ukraine and, concomitantly, to redraw the post-Soviet map. Russia’s formal annexation of Crimea had occurred only two days early, on 18 March, and travel to and from the peninsula was accordingly upended.
The departures board at Atatürk Airport, 20 March 2014.
Simferopol is a mere thirty kilometers from the Bakhchysarai, the eponymous Crimean town famous for the palace of the Crimean Khanate that so inspired Pushkin. When Pushkin penned his verses in the early 1820s, Crimea was a relatively new acquisition on the part of the Romanovs, part of the spoils of Catherine the Great’s victories over the Ottomans in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774, though it was not officially annexed until 1783. The late winter of 2014 was witness to an uncanny repetition of an era of 18th Century imperial rivalry and expansionism—a revenant that has only become bloodier since February of 2022.
I cannot claim to have recalled Pushkin’s poem on that March morning—I did not know it at the time. Once “To the Fountain of the Palace of Bakhchisarai” found its way to me, however, its verses became inseparable from both the specific neo-imperial politics of Russia on the northern Black Sea coast and from the longer, stranger durée of post-imperial formations that saturate political, cultural, and socioeconomic life throughout central Asia, the Middle East, southeast Europe, and beyond. The legacies and memories that form the bedrock for such post-imperial formations are the inspiration for our research group, REVENANT—Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation (ERC Consolidator Grant # 101002908).
“To the Fountain of the Palace of Bakhchisarai” neatly encapsulates the conceptual and methodological commitments of REVENANT. A threefold heuristic of post-imperial persons, post-imperial places, and post-imperial things grounds the collaborative, interdisciplinary, and multiregional research to which REVENANT aspires. “To the Fountain of the Palace of Bakhchisarai” includes examples of each of these guiding rubrics. Alexander Pushkin is an iconic post-imperial figure, one of the dominant embodiments of collective memory of the Romanovs. Bakhchysarai Palace and its surroundings are profoundly post-imperial places—they are the principal architectural legacy of the Crimean Khanate, a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, as well as ambivalent sites of Russian-Romanov and Soviet memory. Finally, the fountain of Pushkin’s rhapsody exemplifies how specific things harness, embody, and lend texture to the political and cultural abstractions of empire.
The fountain at Bakhchysarai. A bust of Pushkin is visible on the left.
REVENANT’s geographic ambitions are expansive and, accordingly, vulnerable to the politics of neo-imperialism in the present. Initially, the research group aspired to encompass the legacies and memories of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov Empires in nine distinct national contexts: Austria, Bosnia Hercegovina, Croatia, Georgia, Greece, Romania, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine. A tripartite logic guided this selection of nation-states and cities within them. Austria, Russia, and Turkey represent the dominant nation-state heirs to the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman Empires; Bosnia-Hercegovina, Romania, and Ukraine, as well as Georgia, each evince inter-imperial legacies as national sites of two or more of the former empires; finally, a triad of port cities in Croatia, Georgia and Greece—Rijeka, Batumi, and Thessaloniki—constitute a distinctive post-imperial urban constellation. As a result of hiccoughs resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, the project officially began somewhat later than expected, on April 1st, 2022. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022 unambiguously, and viciously, illustrated that the politics of imperial pasts and the politics of the neo-imperial present are inseparable. Imperial revenants are unruly. Even before beginning REVENANT, I was compelled to reconsider its scope.
REVENANT’s reorientation has been welcome, not least because the initial stipulation of field sites was excessively schematic. Even as Russia and Ukraine have become inhospitable research contexts, partially for reasons that our research aims to illuminate, other exilic and post-imperial sites have entered our purview. In the Balkans, abiding by contemporary nation-state borders makes little sense in the context of REVENANT—sites in other southeast European nation-states, including Italy, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia, also beckon. Simultaneously, collective memories of the Romanovs and their inter-imperial relationships continue to inspire us, even as the methods available to our research rely on archives and field sites outside of the primary inheritor states of the empire. The post-imperial persons that specific members of REVENANT pursue in their research include 19th Century Bosnian Franciscan intellectuals, a 16th Century Habsburg military hero, Habsburg Archduke and Mexican Emperor Maximilian and his wife Charlotte, and one of the most famous inventors of the fin de siècle, Nikola Tesla. REVENANT’s post-imperial places are myriad—among them are a sunken island in the Danube, an arctic archipelago, a fortress overlooking the Adriatic, and sites of memory for Bashkir Sufis, both shrines on the slopes of the Urals and war memorials in western Europe. Finally, REVENANT’s research constitutes a cabinet of curious post-imperial things, ranging from the scores and librettos of Soviet operas to gigantic memorial bells cast from cannonballs and Neo-Ottoman cuisine.
The triad of nostalgia, amnesia, and tribulation, which supplies the subtitle for REVENANT, underscores the ambivalent forms, inhabitations, and effects of post-imperial revenants. This triple thematic brings us back to Pushkin and Bakhchisarai. Post-imperial nostalgia, yearning for a faded rose, is endemic to former Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov lands. Yet post-imperial memories often “bloom over Lethe,” the river of forgetting—amnesia and forgetting are inextricably bound with nostalgia. And both nostalgia and amnesia are buffeted by “tired waves,” the tribulations of imperial legacies that remain resolutely present in uncanny, remarkable, and unappreciated ways.
[1] Alexander Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman: Selected Poems of Alexander Pushkin, trans. D. M. Thomas (New York: Viking, 1982), p. 45.
