On the history of commemorative representations of the plot about the conquest of Siberia: The icebreaker Ermak as a rhetorical and imagological phenomenon

The world’s first Arctic icebreaker was laid down on the slipways of the English shipbuilding company Armstrong Whitworth & Co, Newcastle, on a Russian order in 1897. Various options were proposed for the name of the ship, but Emperor Nicholas II approved the point proposed by Siberian merchants, and the icebreaker was called Ermak. The article examines why the important technical achievement at the turn of the 20th century was named after the conqueror of Siberia. Two narratives are analyzed to answer this question. The first narrative is about the icebreaker Ermak, which started as a part of the imperial project of the late 19th - early 20th centuries and continued its development during the Soviet period. In this case the material of examination is a book by Stepan Makarov Ermak in the Ice (1901) - a kind of a biography of the icebreaker; metropolitan and Siberian newspapers of 1897-1898; and special studies and encyclopedic articles about the history of the icebreaker, which began to appear in the 1930s. As part of the study, two levels of description into the narrative around the icebreaker were discovered: “imperial” and “public”. The dormer is characterized by emphasizing the dominant position of the monarch/power, the pathos of modernization, progress, breakthrough; the latter by an emphasis on the national character and national spirit, the pathos of liberation. Both of these strategies for describing the icebreaker are due to the dual perception of the conqueror of Siberia in Russian culture. Thus, from an official perspective, the Cossack ataman is attractive because of his desire to atone for guilt towards the tsar and regain his legitimacy in the eyes of society and the authorities; in this vein, the conquest of Siberia was understood as a feat in the name of glory and the tsar. However, for the “democratic” audience of texts about Yermak, the motive of freedom, the Cossacks’ search for “free will”, which they follow in spite of the monarch, is in the foreground. The second narrative is constructed in chronicles and literary texts of the 19th-20th centuries about the Cossack ataman Yermak, where the authors focused on ice motifs. All selected art works with the ice motif can be divided into three groups, in which there is a correlation between intra-textual semantics and functions of the ice motif, on the one hand, and the extra-textual reality - the stages of development of the Russian/USSR icebreaker fleet, on the other. The analysis showed that in Yermak’s stories of the 19th-20th centuries the ice motif is endowed with meanings of liminality, ideas of transition from a primitive, wild, prehistoric terrible space-time into a cultural, mastered, familiar one. Yermak in this case turns out to be the key figure carrying out the transition, breaking through the border, thereby reminiscent of the main function of the icebreaker - building a water road through ice barriers. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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