Historical temporality and Chuvash nationalism in the poetry of Missi Sespel

The author analyzes the texts of Missi Sespel (Mikhail Sespel), the founder of modern Chuvash poetry, through the lens of the imagination and invention of historical time and temporality. The article aims to analyze the concept "historical time" and the perception of historical temporality within Chuvash literature. The author examines both the poetic and prose legacy of Missi Sespel. Utilizing the methodological toolkit proposed by intellectual history and nationalism studies - including the concept of the invention of traditions - the author analyzes the images of historical time and temporality in Missi Sespel's poetry. In the article, the author: (1) studies the specific features of how historical time is perceived in Missi Sespel's poetic and prose texts; (2) identifies and analyzes the systemic characteristics of understanding historical temporality in the modern Chuvash intellectual discourse; (3) examines the role of socialist realism as one particular form of modernist visions and interpretations of culture, serving as a model for inventing historical time. The features of perceiving, imagining, and inventing historical time and historical temporality in Missi Sespel's poetry are studied. Particular attention is paid to analyzing the perception of revolution as a factor accelerating the passage of historical time. The author posits that Missi Sespel not only became the creator of modern Chuvash literature but also proposed modes for understanding and interpreting regimes of historical temporality, forming a new, modern vision of historical time as national, imagined within Soviet communist and Chuvash ethnic frames of reference. The article demonstrates that the logic of understanding modernity in Missi Sespel's texts was based on perceiving the present historical time as a transitional historical and chronological frontier between the past and a nationalistically imagined future. This vision of time can be defined as ideologically utilitarian. The author shows that this ideological utilitarianism was combined with nationalist ideology. Consequently, the analysis focuses on how historical time and the regime of temporality were constructed within an ethnic frame of reference. The author believes that Missi Sespel "Chuvashized" conceptions of Chuvash time, transforming the Chuvash language and ethnicity into systemic characteristics of historical time. The author argues that not merely duration, but the "surmountability" of time - its reduction to a prehistory leading to a politically and ideologically correct future - became central categories in the perception of historical time in Missi Sespel's texts. It is suggested that Missi Sespel created a unique concept of historical time that reduces temporality to a politically and ideologically relevant present, founded on revolutionary experience. The author demonstrates how Missi Sespel became the creator of a new, radical, revolutionary vision of historical time, emphasizing that his poetic legacy was canonized within Soviet ideological discourse, becoming a boundary in the understanding of historical temporality, as Soviet Chuvash literature and a new historical time began precisely with the works of Missi Sespel. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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