‘And With Me, My Russia/I Bring Along in a Travelling Bag’: Literary and Ethnographic Narratives of Russian Exile and Emigration, Past and Present

Abstract

A much-circulated trope amongst post-Revolutionary refugees from Bolshevik Russia stated that upon emigration, ‘Russia’ became reconstituted ‘outside Russia’. This narrative became central to how subsequent émigrés imagined their journeys abroad, simultaneously asserting historical continuity with other ‘waves’ of Russian emigration and defining their own migration trajectory in opposition to them. This research, based on contemporary ethnographic interviews and archival sources across Moscow, Paris, Berlin, and New York examines how tropes of a spiritual connection to Russia made popular by first-wave émigrés continue to circulate amongst present-day Russian intellectuals. Simultaneously, beginning in the early 2000s, Russian state officials began to promote an irredentist, nationalist discourse. This paper argues that at least part of this ideology is derived from first-wave émigré discourses, showing that Russian state strategists have increasingly come to rely on a fragile and internally-contested set of diasporic narratives for Russia’s own self-definition.