{"id":899,"date":"2023-04-20T12:45:18","date_gmt":"2023-04-20T12:45:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revenant.uniri.hr\/?p=899"},"modified":"2023-10-24T09:02:14","modified_gmt":"2023-10-24T09:02:14","slug":"imperial-revenants-persons-places-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revenant.uniri.hr\/?p=899","title":{"rendered":"Imperial Revenants: Persons, Places, Things"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Jeremy F. Walton<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs soon as roses fade,\nBreathing ambrosia,\nTheir souls are flying, \nLightly to Eylsium.\n\nThere, where tired waves\nAre bearing oblivion,\nTheir fragrant shades\nBloom over Lethe.\u201d\n\n--Alexander Pushkin, \u201cTo the Fountain of the Palace of Bakhchisarai\u201d [1]\n<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
March 20th<\/sup>, 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 Atat\u00fcrk Airport. Nestled between upcoming flights to Bucharest and Tehran, Toulouse and Lisbon, a scheduled Atlas Jet service to Simferopol, Crimea\u2019s second largest city, simply read \u201ccancelled.\u201d  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\u2019s formal annexation of Crimea had occurred only two days early, on 18 March, and travel to and from the peninsula was accordingly upended.<\/p>\n\n\n
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The departures board at Atat\u00fcrk Airport, 20 March 2014.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
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\u2019s 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<\/sup> Century imperial rivalry and expansionism\u2014a revenant that has only become bloodier since February of 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I cannot claim to have recalled Pushkin\u2019s poem on that March morning\u2014I did not know it at the time. Once \u201cTo the Fountain of the Palace of Bakhchisarai\u201d 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 dur\u00e9e <\/em>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\u2014Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation (ERC Consolidator Grant # 101002908).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTo the Fountain of the Palace of Bakhchisarai\u201d neatly encapsulates the conceptual and methodological commitments of REVENANT. A threefold heuristic of post-imperial person<\/em><\/strong>s, post-imperial places<\/strong>, <\/em>and post-imperial things<\/em><\/strong> grounds the collaborative, interdisciplinary, and multiregional research to which REVENANT aspires. \u201cTo the Fountain of the Palace of Bakhchisarai\u201d 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\u2014they 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\u2019s rhapsody exemplifies how specific things harness, embody, and lend texture to the political and cultural abstractions of empire.<\/p>\n\n\n
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The fountain at Bakhchysarai. A bust of Pushkin is visible on the left.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
REVENANT\u2019s 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\u2014Rijeka, Batumi, and Thessaloniki\u2014constitute 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<\/sup>, 2022. Russia\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
REVENANT\u2019s 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\u2014sites 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 <\/em>that specific members of REVENANT pursue in their research include 19th<\/sup> Century Bosnian Franciscan intellectuals, a 16th<\/sup> 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 si\u00e8cle, Nikola Tesla. REVENANT\u2019s post-imperial places <\/em>are myriad\u2014among 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\u2019s research constitutes a cabinet of curious post-imperial things<\/em>, ranging from the scores and librettos of Soviet operas to gigantic memorial bells cast from cannonballs and Neo-Ottoman cuisine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cbloom over Lethe,\u201d the river of forgetting\u2014amnesia and forgetting are inextricably bound with nostalgia. And both nostalgia and amnesia are buffeted by \u201ctired waves,\u201d the tribulations of imperial legacies that remain resolutely present in uncanny, remarkable, and unappreciated ways. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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[1]<\/a> Alexander Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman: Selected Poems of Alexander Pushkin,<\/em> trans. D. M. Thomas (New York: Viking, 1982), p. 45.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Jeremy F. Walton \u201cAs 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.\u201d –Alexander Pushkin, \u201cTo the Fountain of the Palace of Bakhchisarai\u201d [1] March 20th, 2014, is a date intimately entwined with Alexander Pushkin in my … <\/p>\n
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