1st International Egodocumental Network Conference
Vilnius University, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, the University of Lodz, and the Egodocumental Research Group (https://egodocuments.umk.pl) organise an international conference focusing on research, development, and changing perceptions of egodocuments in the twenty-first century. The conference aims to bring together scholars from different disciplines to share their insights and to encourage interdisciplinary studies of egodocuments.
The conference will also be the first meeting of the International Egodocumental Network established in December 2023 by the Egodocumental Research Group (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and the University of Lodz) to unite scholars from different disciplines working on egodocuments. It provides a platform for discussion, collaboration, and exchange of information between the participants, as well as online research seminars organized twice a year. In this dimension, our conference continues two editions of the Scientific Symposium "Egodocuments, Life-Writing and Autobiographical Texts..." organized at NCU in Toruń in 2022 and 2024.
Keynote speakers
Dr. Nataliia Voloshkova
Kazimierz Wielki University and Oxford Brookes University
Prof. Leona Toker
Hebrew University and Shalem Academic College
Prof. François-Joseph Ruggiu
Sorbonne Université, CNRS and Oxford University
Tatjana Hofmann
University of St. Gallen
Imperial Legacy and Empathic Solidarity? Zinaida Richter’s Journeys through Georgia in the 1920s
Zinaida Vladimirovna Richter (1890–1967) was probably one of the first Soviet women to travel to the Caucasus. Her two books of travel sketches (in Russian: putevye ocherki) Kavkaz nashikh dnei, 1923–24 (Moscow, 1924) and V solnechnoi Abkhazii i Khevsuretii (Moscow, Leningrad 1930), based on newspaper articles she had previously published as a correspondent for Izvestia, form the beginning of an astonishing series of accounts: Rikhter travelled across the Soviet Union, visited Mongolia and China by plane, Finland by train and boat, and explored Central Asia, especially Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. In a bitter twist of fate, she was sent to Kazakhstan in 1952 during Stalin’s repressions.
In my talk, I would like to undertake a close reading of her Caucasian sketches. I would like to compare them synchronically with those of the LEF-artist Sergei M. Tretiakov, who travelled there shortly afterwards, and diachronically with the Romantic fundus of the nineteenth-century Russian-language literature that shaped the imperial perspective on Georgia. Finally, I will briefly consider if and how Richter’s travel sketches interfere with the contemporary representations of Georgia in the autobiographical accounts of Russian speaking emigrants (in Russian: relokanty), such as Yan Shenkman.
