North as West: The literary image of Karelia and the late Soviet outsideness practice

The article examines the peculiarities of the literary representation of Karelia in the late Soviet literature. The research involves texts by Yury Kazakov, Andrey Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Lev Ozerov, Viktor Starkov, and others, which were written based on trips to Karelia in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s. The historical and cultural features of the area often became significant for writers and poets who came from other regions. These features (bilingualism, dialogue of cultures, historically and geographically determined European influence) emphasized the region’s uniqueness against the background of other territories of the North of Russia. Reflection of the specificity of the region - both natural and cultural - forms the general tone of the essays and lyrics of the late 1960s - early 1980s, realistic in their poetics. Some details of the literary image of Karelia that developed during this period (including the motif of travel, Finno-Ugric and Scandinavian realities and toponyms) reflect the late Soviet practices of “outsideness” (Rus. vnenakhodimost’, a term by Alexei Yurchak), in addition to the development of earlier post-romantic topics. In Ozerov’s, Voznesensky’s, Starkov’s prose and lyrics, the representation of a journey to Karelia acquires the features of time travel, the character’s contact with antiquity/eternity. This position of the character in relation to their time correlates with the mechanisms that developed during that period of the Soviet people’s escape from the haunting day-to-day reality without direct resistance or opposition to the ideological system. In Kazakov’s and Akhmadullina’s Karelian plots, due to the introduction of Finno-Ugric place names, motives, vocabulary, the image of the place sometimes acquires the features of “our abroad,” the “imaginary West.” Unlike the West itself, Karelia was not exclusively imaginary: one could visit it and see it with one’s own eyes, just like the Soviet Baltic states. A trip to Karelia was at the same time consistent with the ideologically acceptable and approved practices of domestic tourism and literary exploration of the North. The features of the “imaginary West” in this case were organically included in the general tendency of romanticizing and mythologizing Karelia in its literary representation of the late Soviet period, developing and complicating the image that had formed back in the 19th century. The cultural multilayeredness of Karelia is obviously attractive for the generation of authors of the Thaw with its heterogeneous culture, which sometimes combined opposite tendencies (interest in the West and the East, in the past and the future, physics and lyrics, socialism and the human face, etc.) and shaped the practice of outsideness. The literary texts of popular authors widely broadcast this image, spreading it among readers. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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