German Borders and Germany as a Boundary: Images of the Liminal Space in the Russian Literature of the Late 18th – Early 20th Centuries

Abstract

The paper examines the spatial images of German borders in the Russian literature of the late 18th – early 20th centuries. These ‘liminal’ descriptions of Germany come in several variations. The first is the image of the boundary as a syncretic and transit locus between Russia and Germany, i.e. between Us and Them respectively. Their features are mixed there as in cases of Karamzin’s Livonia or Skalkovsky’s Kurland. Secondly, the booundary can be presented as a certain point, reaching which the narrator / hero finds themselves in a new space, for example, Travemünde during a sea voyage or Eydtkuhnen when traveling by rail. The description of this conventional point follows several traditions in the travel literature. One was set up by N.M. Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler ”, when the voyager is aware of his transition into Their space and experiences an emotional uplift. Over time, however, this “attack of topophilia” becomes the object of a travesty game and ridicule of the literary tradition, as, for example, in Myatlev’s poem “Sensations and Comments by Madame Kurdyukova Abroad, Dans L’etranger”. Topophilia, interest in the Other, can also be encouraged by the feeling of getting into a more free locus, which marks Germany in particular and Western Europe in general as spaces of freedom (in the travelogues by K.A. Skalkovsky, M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin). Another variant of a Russian traveler’s reaction to crossing the German border is frustration, which is felt in Fonvisin’s letters abroad. Their author feels disenchantment With each new point on the journey, D.I. Fonvizin feel inauthentic German space as the embodiment of the European Other. This generates a third variant of the German liminal locus, when the entire Germany becomes a border, a transitory, boring, semiotically empty place on the way to real Europe, for example, France (texts by D.I. Fonvizin, F.M. Dostoevsky and others). Probably, it determines the perception of the German nation as an average nation without any strongly pronounced characteristics. In addition, the situation of crossing the border with Germany can also be trivialized as opposed to Karamzin’s tradition, as in A.T. Averchenko’s travelogue. Along with topophilia, frustration and indifference in texts about the borders of Germany in the second half of the 19th century describe the motif of topophobia, fear of the Other in its version of the new German Empire, generating images of a latent or obvious threat, aggression, for example, in the texts by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, N.A. Leikin. Finally, early travelogues of this period emphasise the internal borders between German lands, while by the early 20th century the images of the internal German borders fade and become trivial.