Elisa Mucciarelli1; 1 University of Regensburg, Germany
Discussion
Despite being referred to as ‘Pearl of the Black Sea’ and ‘Land of the Soul’ during the Soviet era, Abkhazia has been torn by conflict for much of its history both before and after 1991. This contribution aims to elucidate how the experience of displacement due to war and the necessity to reconstruct one’s own identity in an alien space is elaborated in local fiction. It relies on the analysis of two Russian-language novellas written in the 1990s by famed author Fazil Iskander, Pshada (1993) and Malchik i voina (1997). Both narratives prominently feature characters from Abkhazia and the North Caucasus who are forced to leave their homeland in the face of conflict – the Second World War in the case of Pshada and the Abkhaz-Georgian civil war of 1992-93 in the case of Malchik i voina – and find themselves in need to reconstruct its space in discourse while living in the diaspora. The – more or less successful – renegotiation of a space disrupted and fragmented by the experience of war proves crucial in order to ease one’s discomfort in an unfamiliar space and come to terms with one’s own in-between identity. This contribution will rely on Y. Lotman’s semiotic theories to analyse how space is created in the texts by means of the written language, and connect such theories to more recent spatial concepts in literature and human geography in order to highlight the dynamic nature of (literary) space, its instability in the face of disruption, and how this connects to the broader instability of the (social) space of the region.
