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.