Silver-age writers on the 'black' continent: Russia, Africa, and the celebration of distance (Konstantin Dmitrievich Bal'mont, Bely, Andrei, Nikolay Gumilyov)

This dissertation examines the theme of Africa in Russian literature, particularly in the essays, travel memoirs, fiction, and poetry of Silver-Age writers Konstantin Balmont, Andrei Bely, and Nikolai Gumilyov. Read alongside other Euro-American treatments of Africa, these Russian texts can be seen to express a desire to keep it intact, unpossessed, and emphatically non-Western—an end in keeping with Russia's own lack of participation in the colonization of the continent. At the same time, they reflect some broader tendencies of Euro-American modernism, including especially concerns about the vanishing of “exotic” cultures. While the works addressed, Russian and otherwise, exhibit certain Orientalist and Africanist traits, this study focuses on those elements of the narration that effectively work against the will to power and knowledge, whether by directly questioning the rightness of European rule in Africa, by celebrating the agency of native Africans, by grieving when indigenous peoples assimilate or die out, or by expressing delight in the limits of the knowable and the impenetrability of “otherness.”; The Russian support of Africa is born sometimes of sympathy for the oppressed, sometimes of ambivalence toward the continent's Western European overlords. Elsewhere still, and most importantly for the Silver-Age writers, it derives from an aesthetic valuation of diversity and a wish to prolong the fertile darkness that allows a compensatory imagination to bring forth, even in the modern era, that element of the fantastic that thrives best where knowledge tapers off into uncertainty. Therefore distance, as a grounds for cultural uniqueness and as a spur to artistic invention, is invoked here as a potentially positive concept. That potential is realized to varying degrees and in various ways in the works of the three writers, a fact that results in part from their various literary affiliations: the early Symbolism of Balmont, the later Symbolism of Bely, and the Acmeism of Gumilyov. At the same time all three, by virtue of their Russian-ness, share in common a fruitful space on the margins of colonialera discourse on Africa.