The Rise of Insider Iconography : Visions of Soviet Turkmenia in Russian-Language Literature and Film, 1921-1935
This study investigates how Turkestan generally and Turkmenia more specifically were represented in Russian-language film and literature in the early Soviet period. By analyzing the work of writers and filmmakers as well as the ideological and artistic constraints that they faced, I explore not only depictions of these spaces, but also the biographies of several of their key depicters, delving into the historical circumstances in which given texts were produced and the relationship between these texts and the larger artistic fields into which they were released. The study opens with a discussion of texts by "outsiders" who positioned Turkmenia as a space worthy of exploration between 1921 and 1927. Chapter One examines two essay collections by the Eurasianists - Iskhod k vostoku. Predchuvstviia i sversheniia. Utverzhdenie evraziitsev (Exit to the East: Forebodings and Events: An Affirmation of the Eurasians, 1921) and Na putiakh. Utverzhdenie evraziitsev (On the Way: An Affirmation of the Eurasians, 1922) - as well as Dziga Vertov's documentary film Shestaia chast' mira (One Sixth of the World, 1926) and two literary works by Nikolai Tikhonov, a "fellow traveler" who passed through Turkmenistan in the mid-1920s
Thesis, Dissertation, English, 2013
[publisher not identified], [New York, N.Y.?], 2013