Crimean Text In Russian Literature

Crimea is a major land mass on the northern coast of the Black Sea.The peninsula is located south of Ukraine,east of European continent,and west of Russia,and faces Turkey across the sea to the north.Crimea is called "Pearl in the Black Sea" for its special climate,exquisite scenery,flourishing vegetation,and abundant resources.As a place of military strategic importance,it has been occupied by several countries in history for its significant geographic position.In history,sometimes Crimea cut no figure,sometimes it rose up to the horizon.In March,2014,Crimea’s referendum made this peninsula the focus point of the whole world again.In Russian literature,Crimea always embodies a mysterious image which plays an interesting role.Before the 19th century,this peninsula only appeared in Russian literature as a remote southern borderland barely known by people.Until 1820 when the poet Pushkin was exiled to the south and composed a series of poems about Crimea and the surrounding seas,this peninsula has begun to attract more and more artists and become a common image for writing and depiction.In the disguised exile,Pushkin gained abundant and unique experiences and in the meantime greatly promoted the development of culture and art on the peninsula.During the Crimea War(1853-1856),young Leo Tolstoy once volunteered to go to Crimea to attend the Sevastopol War.Sevastopol Sketches is the memorandum taken by him on the battlefield during the Siege of Sevastopol.After the war and with the development of capitalist economy,Crimea gradually became an ideal tourist attraction and resort for Russian upper-class aristocracies.One of Chekhov’s famous short stories,The Woman with a Little Dog,is told under such a social background.When it came to the 20th century,more and more men of letters arrived in Crimea,such as Marina Tsvetayeva,Anna Ahmatova,Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam,Maxim Gorky,Andrei Bely,Vladimir Mayakovsky,Aleksey Tolstoy,Mikhail Zoshchenko Mikhail Bulgakov and so on,and created excellent literary works.On one hand,they inherited the means of artistic expression from the predecessors,on the other hand,they embodied the image with new interpretations under the background of a new era.In one word,writers from generation to generation have depicted the image of the peninsula in different times,and contemporaries formed a multi-dimensional prospect of Crimea from different perspectives.Crimea has its significance in their writing careers,and their writings in return enrich the peninsula with vitality and literary prosperity.In broad sense,text is a concept concerned about different areas of human science.Many independent and separated elements of a place,such as its natural landscape,history,geography,culture,and social life,can form an organic whole in virtue of the concept text.For this,Regional Text well interprets the relationship between people and regions.The scholar,V.V Abashev,put forward this concept in his work Perm as Text:Perm in the Twentieth-Century Russian Literature and Culture,which has still been in widespread and efficient use for relevant literary criticism at present.In Russian literary history,Crimea has as high text significance as Petersburg and Moscow.Crimea text exactly expresses the peculiarity and distinction of this peninsula and its identifiers.In order to further interpret the regional cognition of Crimea and the relationships between itself and literary works concerned,this article explores and analyzes Crimea text from a literary perspective.This article is constituted with introduction,the first chapter,the second chapter,the third chapter,conclusion and bibliography.The first chapter sets out the different interpretations of text in disciplinary human sciences.By clarification of the concept of regional text,the first chapter explores the mutual relationship between human and regions.With a further analysis of the concept and meaning for Crimea text,this chapter will study on the historical formation process.The second chapter focuses on the analysis of the Crimea text in the 19th-century Russian literature.Through analysis of the image of Crimea in the creative consciousness of several classical writers,we can find that Pushkin’s depiction of Crimea is mainly based on his own memory and imagination.The theme of Crimea occupied a central position in Pushkin’s romantic verses in the 1820s.Moreover,the poet,being inspired by the myths and legends of the peninsula,created long verses embodying mysterious color,while the poet himself became a part of the myth which rooted deeply in people’s cultural cognition of Crimea.Compared with the romantic description of Pushkin,another literature master-Leo Tolstoy—revealed an authentic but cruel Crimea according to his own experiences.Human weakness—vanity,cowardice,horror—was exposed in the mean time of eulogizing soldiers’ bloody battles in the Sevastopol War.For Leo Tolstoy,the significance of human being surpasses the geographic positions they locate,but the patriotism and battle spirit expressed in his Crimea text imposes a far-reaching influence on the enforcement of a sense of national pride for the peninsula and the later literary creations.Chekhov,from describing the romantic affairs between the male and female protagonists,revealed the after-war social phenomenon in Crimea which was taken as a tourist attraction and health resort for the upper class.The difference is,the author put an emphasis on the spiritual awakening and self-atonement of the protagonists after they fell in love.The stories give an exquisite description of love,which derides from not only Chekhov’s keen and meticulous observations in Yalta,but his personal experiences and feelings.In any case,the creations of the 19th-century classic writers greatly enrich the literary image and cultural semanteme of Crimea,and form a striking contrast to the themes of idleness,vanity,and degeneration in Petersburg and Moscow text.The third chapter aims at analyzing the Crimea text in the 20th-century Russian literature.In the turbulent era,many writers still inherited the eminent literary traditions:Marina Tsvetayeva,following the footsteps of Pushkin,arrived at the places where Pushkin had left his footprints,and expressed her great ambitions for future;in the concept of Mandelstam,Crimea,in heritance of ancient Greek culture,is more a symbol of ancient civilization.Under the pens of several other writers,Crimea is endowed with the characteristics of the new era:the owner of the villa—Voloshin objected to writers describing Crimea from the perspective of outside tourists and took the representation of Crimea poetics and spirits as the poet’s own obligation;Vladimir Mayakovsky creatively made the peninsula "Sanatorium for Soviet" under the new social ideology,where a multi-aspect development for human being was ongoing;Vasily Aksyonov opened a new path to imagine Crimea as a prosperous and rich capitalist island separated from the Soviet Union,while different generations’ different attitudes toward the relationship between the peninsula and Soviet reflect the contradictory attitudes of Crimean people toward Soviet.Every work of every writer is closely linked to his or her own creation background and personal experiences.Therefore,although their works have the same Crimea theme,the 20th-century Crimea text is still embodied with the characteristics of the new era.In conclusion,an interpretation of this distinctive and mysterious peninsula from a literary perspective enables us to further understand the ethnic culture of Crimea and the literary connotations of the pertinent works.