CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Munteanu, Daniela |
|---|---|
| Title | Self and Mission in Russia Abroad: How Russian Intellectuals Created Existential Meaning in Exile, 1919-1939 |
| Summary | In the aftermath of the October Revolution and Civil War, the White Army, accompanied by politicians, intellectuals, civilian staff and their families, left Russia to form an émigré community that lasted from 1919 to 1939 and has since been known as Russia Abroad. The Russian emigrants committed to conserve Russianness and promote Russian culture while in exile. They managed to create a sense of belonging and common identity through hundreds of newspapers, journals and books that crossed political and geographical borders to form an “imagined community” stretching across dozens of cities in the world. They created and conserved this Russianness within a certain conceptual framework that informed their opinions, arguments and judgement. In this thesis I reconstruct this conceptual framework within which the Russians made sense of Russia´s recent past and their new circumstances, created their identities and looked for existential meaning. This framework was itself formed of concepts and in this thesis I research three of them in particular: lichnost´ (individuality), tvorchestvo (creativity) and missii͡a (mission) – concepts central to Russian intellectual thought. In emigration, lichnost´ was the creative subject-agent of history, the site of struggle against Bolshevism and conservation of Russianness. Tvorchestvo was the activity, the creation and creativity of Russian emigrants as Russian by soul and culture in the name of Russia. This was, in fact, the essence of their missii͡a – to serve Russia while in exile by engaging in literary and philosophical production. One day these works, imbued with freedom that the Russian emigrants had learnt while in exile in the West, were supposed to enter Russia and accompany its revival. By the late 1980s, works published in emigration started to make their way into USSR to inform the intellectual thought there. In this thesis I research the conceptual framework within which the émigré thoughts and ideas were created, a framework that also suggests an reading key of the Russian émigré thought. |
| Supervisor | Hall, Karl |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/munteanu_daniela.pdf |
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