41st Annual Conference: “Journeys” nui galway, 4-6 May 2017 Conference Abstracts


Allan Reid (University of New Brunswick)



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Allan Reid (University of New Brunswick)

Late in her career Natalia Gorbanevskaia (1936 – 2013) began—surprisingly to those who knew her—to look back on her poetic and intellectual legacy with a long gaze and in a particularly thematic manner.  Following a collection of her published writing on poetry and poets, she compiled two retrospective volumes of her verse, one containing a broad selection of her religiously themed poetry (which I have analyzed here:  http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2014/129/13r.html), and a second entitled Goroda i dorogi (2013).  This latter volume includes poems thematically linked to her passion for cities and to the expression of travel in her work.  Long before the appearance of this volume,  it had been my contention that movement, in a range of manifestations is, alongside motifs associated with her religious and spiritual ideas and beliefs, the ‘other’ central and dominant element informing her poetry, ideas and life.  It assumes a range of forms, and in this paper I propose to highlight several of them, including the political and metaphysical, as well as the more strictly lyrical and personal.  I will connect the poetic expression of movement and travel in her work to her incessant travels, associated with the desire for freedom of movement in her early life in the Soviet Union, her linguistic and cultural border crossing, especially between Polish and Russian, and to the powerful expression of various kinds of mobile liminality throughout her life and work.  In my paper I will draw largely on examples from her poetic oeuvre, as well as certain biographical details. 

Cross-border patient mobility, consumer citizenship and the uneven European healthcare space’

Sabina Stan (Dublin City University)

The paper argues that cross-border patient mobility in Europe has to be seen in the larger context of the manners in which states and markets, labour and capital have shaped the provision of services (such as healthcare) that contribute to both the reproduction of both labour and the building of citizenship. The paper sees healthcare services in Europe as being linked not only to the development of citizenship rights at national and European levels, but also, and increasingly in the last decades, to processes of market-building and capitalist accumulation feeding on uneven development both inside and among EU member states. In particular, European eastwards enlargements and healthcare privatisation led to the EU becoming an uneven healthcare space whereby healthcare expenditure, wage and quality levels in richer regions and countries (most notably in EU-15) contrast with those available in poorer ones (most notably in the new member states). The paper argues that cross-border patient mobility in Europe participates in both market building and the building of citizenship, and that it contributes to the rise of a transnational but uneven and consumerist citizenship in Europe. It illustrates these processes through an analysis of recent studies and surveys on cross-border care in Europe. The paper focuses on east-west cross-border patient flows and the manners in which the latter are rooted in and contribute in their turn to imbalanced flows of people and resources between the western and eastern parts of the continent. 



Panel 11: Cold War Journeys in Central Europe (The Bridge)

Chair: Andreas Agocs (University of the Pacific, Stockton, California)

Controlled journey to the past—German travellers in Poland after the Second World War (1945-1989)

Agnieszka Pufelska (Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in North-Eastern Europe, Lüneburg)

The history of the Germans in Poland seemed to be over after the expulsion of Germans between 1939 and 1950; however, the Germans were in several ways still very present. Architectural monuments remained from the German past, historical images lived on in the memories of people, as well as the personal contacts which survived the regime change. The Communist government was forced to deal with all these factors and to control and shape new German-Polish relations to conform to Communist views on memory. This contribution will focus mainly on the analysis of the specific experiences which the travelers from East and West Germany to Poland had after 1945. It concerns, on the one hand, the official and government-controlled defaults for these transactions, and on the other hand, the real form of encounters between Germans and Poles. Their contacts often went far beyond the tourist aspect. Many visitors were looking at their journey from a perspective of „back home“ while the hosts were obliged at the same time to present a positive image of the Socialist system, an image in accordance with government ordinance. The paper examines which scope of action determined their meetings and what kind of consequences all these contacts may have had. What images of Germany and Poland were they attempting to transfer? In what ways were journeys to Poland a „mourning work“ for the German travelers?

From Howth to Warsaw: The Rev. Canon Harry Armstrong’s 1950 Journey to Communist Poland’

Ger Madden (NUI Galway)

In Britain and Ireland during the early Cold War, Christian leaders, both Catholic and Protestant, were strongly critical of the Soviet Union and the post-war expansion of its sphere of influence, decrying what they perceived as atheistic communism’s repression of religion in the expanded Eastern Bloc. Some rank-and-file clergymen, such as Stanley Evans and Hewlett Johnson of the Church of England, dissented against this viewpoint, encountering, in the words of Cold War scholar Dianne Kirby, ‘unrelenting unpleasantness, obstruction and isolation’ from their ecclesiastical superiors for advocating understanding of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe’s new post war communist regimes. This paper will examine the 1950 visit to Poland of an Irish contemporary of Evans and Johnson, the Rev. Canon Harry Armstrong. Armstrong, Rector of St. Mary’s Church of Ireland Parish in Howth, Co. Dublin, was a leading figure in the Church of Ireland Peace Fellowship who was also involved in the World Peace Council (WPC), an international campaign dominated by communists. In 1951, he attended the WPC’s congress in Warsaw, where he participated in its activities and addressed delegates. On his return to Ireland, Armstrong published a pamphlet detailing his visit, A Visit to the Warsaw Peace Congress as an Observer, which argued that religious liberty was greater in Poland than contemporary reports in Ireland suggested. This view went against the Cold War consensus in Ireland, and this paper will trace Armstrong’s account of his visit to Poland and reactions to it within the Church of Ireland, the Irish Catholic Church and the Irish Department of External Affairs.

Rákosi’s travels: A Hungarian Communist’s Journey to the West’

Balázs Apor (Trinity College Dublin)

The paper is based on a close reading of Mátyás Rákosi’s memoirs, written in Soviet exile in the 1960s. The former Chief Secretary of the Hungarian Workers’ Party wrote an awful lot—the memoirs were published in four hefty volumes—yet the best part of the manuscript is devoted to justifying his actions as the prime agent of Hungary’s Stalinization. However, the first volume of his memoirs, which focuses on the fallen leader’s childhood and his teenager years, is strikingly different from the rest of the manuscript. Written in a surprisingly eloquent way, this part of the book offers a detailed, well-informed and quite accurate analysis of rural society in fin-de-siécle Hungary. This section of the book also contains lengthy descriptions of Rákosi’s travels to the West; to Hamburg and London, in particular. As a student of the Eastern Academy—a third level institution specialized in teaching commerce—he was granted the opportunity to study abroad and gain some practical experience, as well. Rákosi chose to travel to two of the most significant hubs of the world’s economy in the early-20th century. The two journeys were not merely study trips, they contributed significantly to the development of Rákosi’s political views. The paper will analyse how cultural encounters in two of the busiest metropolises in Europe at the time shaped the personality as well as the political identity of the Hungarian Communist.



18:00-19.30 Staged Reading of ‘Gondla’ Bank of Ireland Theatre

20:00 Conference dinner, Viña Mara, Middle Street

Saturday, 6 May



9.20-10.40 Session E

Panel 12: Russian Journeys (Room G010)

Chair: Dáibhí Ó Cróinín (NUI Galway)

Zuleikha’s Anti-Journey’

Giulia Gigante (Free University of Brussels)

The journey into Siberia of a Tatar woman uprooted from her home village, narrated by Guzel Yakhina in Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes - one of the most remarkable contemporary Russian novels - has many interesting aspects. This journey, given its enforced nature, can be defined as an 'anti-journey'. The protagonist, together with another 300 brothers of misfortune differing in age, geographical origin and social background, is deported as part of the 'dekulakization' of the early 1930s and travels throughout Russia without knowing where she is going or why. Despite this, for Zulejkha, the journey represents a voyage of initiation that implies her inner maturation, a process that takes on the features of an existential transformation. The forced nature of the journey and the extremely difficult conditions in which it takes place do not stop either the reader or the characters of the novel – at least those who manage to survive hunger, hardship and disease – perceiving the beauty of the places that they pass through and of the remote corner of Siberia where they will be obliged to start living from scratch, as twentieth-century Robinson Crusoes. The cinematographic narrative technique used by the writer makes the journey even more vivid. Stopping places appear as a glimpse through the grating of a freight car or captured out of the corner of the eye as a succession of impressionistic details, which, maybe for this very reason, become effectively stamped on the reader's mind. Guzel Yakhina intensifies this using a device of estrangement (остранение) that echoes the bewilderment of people forced by a senseless and blind political programme to endure a journey without even knowing the names of the localities they are passing through.

Andrei Amalrik’s involuntary ethnography: building up late-Soviet non-conformist subjectivity’

Innocentiy Martynow (International Memorial Society, Moscow)
Soviet dissident and absurdist playwright Andrei Amalrik (1938–1980) was arrested in 1965, accused of «social parasitism» and sentenced to banishment in a collective farm (kolhoz) near Tomsk. He described his experience of exile in «Involuntary journey to Siberia» («Нежеланное путешествие в Сибирь», 1970). In contrast to soviet imprisonment fiction, Amalrik succeeded in turning a penitentiary experience into anthropological one, making the account of his imprisonment into a travelogue. Among the many topics he brings up on his way from Moscow to Tomsk, Amalrik builds up an original ‘ethnography’ of a collective farm in a colonial-like perspective. The other-minded intellectual views the collective farmers (kolhozniki) as a surprisingly non-Soviet Other (in contrast, still alienated and ‘acid’, the milieu of cultural and ideological mainstream remained soviet). Straddling the genres of documentary and absurdist literature, Amalrik-ethnographer depicts kolkhoz as aboriginal ‘looking glass world’, thus thinking though the more profound anthropological experience — the one, which reveals and legitimates his non-conformist identity and selfhood. The paper studies Amalrik’s accounts of Self and Other during the forced journey by the means of narrative and semiotics analyses. The approach allows to reveal some patterns of building up the subjectivety of late-soviet nonconformist and their possible sources as well. The presentation also deals with Amalrik’s impact on identity and iconography of «dissident» in soviet and western discourse.

‘“From battles and blood to Byron and banknotes: An Analysis of Aleksandr Suvorov’s conquest journeys and their impact in the Russian diaspora in Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova’



Ángel Luis Torres Adán (Autonomous University of Barcelona)

A war of conquest could be reduced in essence to a series of journeys, with a nationalist objective—seize land from another social group to expand your own territory. Starting from this premise, this paper centres on the historical figure of Generalissimo Aleksandr Suvorov and the influence of his campaigns of conquest on the socio-political life of ethnic Russians in today’s Transnistria (Moldova) and Odessa Oblast (Ukraine). The first section will focus on the consolidation of Suvorov’s career during the Russo-Turkish War of 1787-92, when the commander, after defeating the Turks, gained an almost mythological status within the lands of Catherine II. He became a subject of popular culture and was seen to exemplify the virtues of the Russian state and people. The second section examines his cult after death. One part of Lord Byron’s Don Juan is entirely devoted to the Siege of Ismail the figure of Suvorov in a satirical sense that deeply contrasts with the status of national hero that he still enjoyed in Russia. The final part of the paper addresses the image of Suvorov among ethnic Russians who inhabit the lands that he conquered. Even today this historical figure still has the power to unite Russians around a common symbol that reminds them of their past and binds them to their distant motherland.



Panel 13: Russian Encounters with its Asian Periphery (Room G011)

Chair: Kevin O’Sullivan (NUI Galway)

Okno v prostor: Bal’mont in Japan’

Martina Morabito (University of Genoa)

Vacillating between the yellow peril ideology and the European fashion of japonisme, Russian modernist culture often took up the idea of Japan as a powerful symbol of the “Other”, even while mainly describing it according to orientalizing stereotypes. Without ever really visiting the country, Russian writers limited themselves to perpetuating the traditional reception of Japan by repeating fixed notions: it was the land of the Sun, inhabited by sexually desirable geishas in a miniaturized landscape. While many symbolists limited themselves to merely imagining travels around the world, the poet Konstantin Bal'mont was the personification of “wanderlust”, actually visiting countries ranging from Egypt to Mexico, Oceania and India, to name just a few. This paper will explore Bal'mont's travels to Japan (1916) and his experience of Japanese culture in the context of Russian ideas about that nation on the eve of the Revolution. In Japan he experienced a poetical “recognition” of something familiar in the “Oriental” landscape. Upon his return, he aligned himself clearly with Japanese culture and the Japanese way of life. He also started writing haiku in Russian, a form which became for him a metaphor for Symbolist poetry itself. We will pay particular attention to the literary depiction of “movement”: a recurrent topos in Bal'mont Japanese lyrics is wandering in the prostor in search of “Oriental” peace.

A Question of Humanity: Civil War Migrants and Refugees in Manchuria’

Yuexin Rachel Lin (National University of Singapore)

The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and subsequent Civil War inflicted immense human cost on many communities across the Russian empire and beyond. On the one hand, it unleashed a torrent of suffering across Europe and Asia, as refugees fled across the border and throughout the world. On the other, Red and White forces sought to extract resources from, and impose their political visions on, the populations they controlled. The violence and instability that resulted affected non-Russian or migrant groups within the empire itself. This paper examines the impact of the Russian Civil War on two communities: the Chinese diaspora in the Russian Far East and Russian emigres in Manchuria. It examines how, from 1920, the depredations of the Civil War led to a wave of migration into China as Russian refugees escaped the conflict and Chinese migrants returned home. These journeys had a profound impact on Chinese perceptions of the Bolshevik regime, and of their position with regards to Russia and the world. Returning migrants brought accounts of Red brutality, undermining the soviets’ attempts to forge links with China. The sight of desperate, starving Russian refugees massed along the border triggered questions of China’s role in sheltering them. Humanitarian aid to the refugees not only reversed the long-standing self-perception of Russian strength and Chinese weakness, but also bolstered China’s moral authority in a “modern” world. The sudden influx of both Chinese and Russians into Manchuria informed diplomatic policy and China’s nationalist agenda. The paper is based on under-explored Chinese-language sources, held at the Foreign Ministry archives in Taipei. These include correspondence from Chinese migrants and Manchurian border officials who were responsible for settling Russian refugees. It provides a counter-narrative to Russian-language accounts of the émigré movement, highlighting the Chinese dimension of the journeys induced by the Russian Civil War.



Panel 14: Literary Depictions of the Stalinist and Nazi Era (The Bridge)

Chair: Conny Opitz (Trinity College Dublin/University of St. Andrews)

A Hungry Journey: A Literary Expression of Ukraine’s 1932-33 Famine in Alexander J. Motyl’s Sweet Snow

Tatiana Krol (Dublin City University)

The word ‘journey’ can be applied in many contexts, equipping researchers with multiple possibilities for its use and interpretation. This paper discusses literary depictions of a journey in famine fiction. Based on an analysis of the novel Sweet Snow by American author of Ukrainian origin Alexander J. Motyl, it analyses the function of a journey in the representation of Ukraine’s greatest tragedy – the 1932-33 Holodomor. Imagology is the critical study of national images in literature, which is apt for an examination of this literary work, for the novel’s protagonists belong to disparate nations and ethnic groups, and represent divergent ideological beliefs and cultural values. The paper demonstrates that along with the novel’s images of national character, the depictions of the characters’ journey through the winter of 1933 produce systems of meaning, which serve to show the devastating effects of Soviet rule in Ukraine. More specifically, the paper focuses on the representation of space as the main tool in the structure of the journey. It argues that the transition from small to large spaces − from the places of the characters’ arrests, an interrogation room, a cell in prison, a prisoner transport van, and finally, their escape into the vast territory of Ukraine’s famine-stricken countryside, reinforced by the intensification of the disgust imagery, functions to express Ukraine’s trauma, generated by the man-made famine.


Thirst for Change: Jurij Trifonov’s Utolenie Žaždy

Clemens Günther (Free University, Berlin)

During the first Five Year Plan many writers travelled to construction plants to write about “glorious socialist progress”. Their literary reports shaped the genre of the production novel and contributed to the formation of Socialist Realism in the 1930s. During the Thaw, this tradition continued and writers were again sent to building sites such as the Bratskaya GES or the Karakum Canal. Jurij Trifonov was among this new generation of writers, travelling to Turkmenistan and writing Utolenie Žaždy upon his return. Although this novel has not received much critical attention, it deserves a closer analysis. At first, the hero’s journey to Soviet Turkmenistan is an interesting example of late Soviet orientalism. The discursive stance of orientalism played a crucial role in the depiction of early Soviet infrastructure projects such as the famous Turksib project of the 1920s. I aim to show how Trifonov’s novel relates to this tradition, outlining the continuities but also the ruptures in his approach to Soviet infrastructure projects in Central Asia. Secondly, Utolenie Žaždy is also a journey through time which deals with the Stalinist past, its crimes and the difficulties in overcoming its legacy. Thirdly, the novel is a journey into the hero’s inner self who must come to terms with his private and professional life. In comparison with the classical novels of the 1930s like Kataev’s Time, Forward or Gladkov’s Energija, I am going to show how Trifonov’s novel challenges the foundations of the genre via a different notion of journey.

Homeward bound? Allegorical travels in Josef Hora’s Jan Houslista

Frances Jackson (University of Munich)

Despite the manifold restrictions placed upon writers and the steps taken to silence many completely, the early years of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were a surprisingly fruitful period for Czech literature. Poets, in particular, enjoyed commercial success like never before and stood at the forefront of the cultural resistance to the German occupation, using verse to decry the outrages of the day and preserve a sense of national identity. However, the reintroduction of censorship inevitably gave rise to more veiled forms of poetic expression than had previously been typical, the subversive content of which was not always apparent at first glance. A prime example of this trend is Josef Hora’s allegorically-loaded narrative poem Jan Houslista, which describes the bittersweet return of long-exiled musician to his homeland, now empty of the people he once loved. Drawing on the theoretical work of Paul de Man, this paper aims to provide a detailed analysis of Hora’s use of figurative language and the travel metaphor to help unpick the necessarily oblique references to contemporary life. Parallels will also be drawn with other compositions of this era, especially Vladimír Holan’s Terezka Planetová, another narrative poem that abounds with symbolically significant journeys and articulates the impossibility of returning in the present to somewhere – or somebody – that one knew in the past.



10:40-11.10 Tea/Coffee in Foyer

11:10-12:30 Session F

Panel 15: Military Journeys in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Room G010)

Chair: Lili Zách (Independent Scholar)

Military Journeys and Trans-Imperiality: The Russian-Ottoman Encounters of the late 1820s and the early 1830s’

Darin Stephanov (Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Denmark)

In the war of 1828-29, the Russian Empire carried out incursions into Ottoman territories in Europe and Asia, which resulted in victory and years of subsequent occupation. In 1833, Russian troops were stationed in Istanbul to provide security vis-à-vis Mehmed Ali of Egypt. In all of these locales, the Russian authorities celebrated lavishly a number of recently established secular public holidays (the royal birthday, saint namesake’s day, coronation day, etc.), much to the awe of local Ottoman Muslims and non-Muslims alike. These were unprecedented acts for a foreign royalty on Ottoman soil, with no equivalent even for Ottoman royalty itself. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, it draws attention to these large-scale ceremonial events, which remain to this day completely unresearched even in their domestic Russian context, against the background of the young Emperor Nicholas I’s systematic policy of ruler visibility. Second, it states the case for a momentous, yet hitherto unacknowledged Russian influence on the composition of Sultan Mahmud II’s own image-making policies, which had already been placed on a similarly ascendant trajectory in the aftermath of his abolition of the Janissary Corps in 1826. Thus, in 1836, for the first time in Ottoman history, annual celebrations of the royal birthday and accession day commenced in the capital, the provinces, and abroad. In 1837, immediately following the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ottoman European territories, Mahmud II went on an unprecedented personal tour of the very same lands. Methodologically, the paper relies on new techniques of close textual analysis and microhistory, applied to a large body of untapped sources – letters and reports from the field – appearing on the pages of the semi-official Russian imperial newspaper, Северная Пчела.

Hungarian Soldiers in Transylvania and Galicia in World War II’


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