On the 100th Anniversary of the birth of Academician Nikita Ilyich Tolstoy – The Ulica Nikite Tolstoja hodonym on the city map of Vrsac (Serbia)

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the renaming of Ljubljanska street in the city of Vrsac (Serbia) to commemorate Nikita Tolstoy on May 22, 2005. The paper’s author, who was then working as a Humanities Program assistant at the Russian Center of Science and Culture in Belgrade under the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, relays a memoir that references relevant media articles and describes the events which preceded this commemorative event. The memory of this outstanding philologist has become at once part of the historical and cultural legacy of his native city and the everyday context of its inhabitants thanks to the involvement of key individuals who are commemorated here. As pro-Europeanism led to the change of many Serbian naming conventions, the hodonym Ulica Nikite Tolstoja was adopted thanks to the efforts of Serbs, the residents of Vrsac, Russian employees of the Russian Center of Science and Culture in Belgrade, and the descendants of the Russian refugees who emigrated to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia between the two world wars. The renaming unites several types of historical convention, i.e. (1) to commemorate an outstanding person biographically associated with a place, in this case, the city of Vrsac, (2) the great Russian writer's attitude towards Serbs regarding their descent from and recognition of the global significance of Russian culture; (3) commemoration of a strong Russian figure also spiritually close to the Serbs; (4) commemoration of a humanist who was engaged in the history of the Serbian language and the study of the spiritual culture of the Slavs; (5) attitude to historical events related to the liberation of Serbia and this city from Nazi occupation during World War II; (6) attitude to the heritage of Russian emigration which fostered the revival of Kingdom of Yugoslavia after the First World War; (7) commemoration of a figure who unites within himself two parts of Russian society torn apart by the Civil War. Each of these semantic layers is determined by the peculiarities of the outstanding personality and biography of Academician Nikita Tolstoy. The initiators of this commemorative toponym hoped that its multiple semantic layers would allow it to be preserved in the geocultural space of Vrsac regardless of future political change. Neither narrower Serbian-Russian relations nor other factors should diminish the legitimate breadth of the consideration behind it.