Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ebook, loc. A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland. Forest and swamp formed a vernacular space in the common imaginary, as described in historian Kate Brown’s analysis of merging physical and magical landscapes across multi-ethnic borderlands comprising today’s Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine in the period shortly before the Bolshevik revolution: ”Unclean forces took the form of spirits of the house, the stream, forest, and swamp, as well as of the walking dead.” Brown, K. These cosmologies created the backdrop to multi-ethnic religious practices syncretising Christianity, Islam, and Judaism with cycles of nature and countryside deities. Religious rites were performed among birches, oaks, and willows, while felling a sacred tree was a great sin and misfortune. Regional Slavic cosmologies, where magic often merged with reality, consider woodlands places of holy worship. Urbanisation progressed heterogeneously, while on the peripheries of the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires, ethnic and class tensions shifted constantly.ĭespite these demographic shifts and transformations, folk traditions persisted in songs, legends, and crafts animating cultural collectives and artistic endeavours, while at the core of the Balto-Slavic symbolist imaginary, the anxiety-ridden landscape spread, with its supernatural inhabitants. In Eastern Europe, the peasant class made up most of the population: over 80 per cent at the beginning of the 20th century, with up to 90 per cent in some areas, and a correspondingly small urban bourgeoisie. Resistance across the East to a similar mass urbanisation came from the persistence of the feudal landholding system and from serfdom, which had been enforced since the early 14th century. Available at: article/the-heterogeneous-temporalities-of-russias-colonialism/.The mythologised yet non-homogeneous east remained primarily agrarian, in contrast to heavily urbanised Western European cities of the period, where industrialisation precipitated particular social organisation, engendering the infamous fin-de-siècle decadence. The heterogeneous Temporalities of Russia’s Colonialism, Parse Journal 13.2, summer 2021. The latter is a term that may be understood as the ”self-identification of communities and persons, which emerges from the relations to the soil, water, and one another.' Shestakova, S. With the Symbolist movement’s emphasis on liberating creative expression, we gain insight into the complex intermingling of art, identity, and indigeneity.

Tales from the borderlands tropes