Podlubnova Yu. S. “Here the Dashing Death Will Soon Play with the Crumpled Feather Grass”. Geography and Geographical Imagination in the Komsomol Poetry of the Urals in the 1920s

Yulia S. Podlubnova 
Candidate of Philological Sciences, Institute of History and Archaeology, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia, Еkaterinburg)
ORCID: 0000-0001-5210-0861
E-mail: tristia@yandex.ru

 Download | Back to the Content № 2. 2025

UDC 82-1:913(470.5)”1920″
DOI: 10.58529/2782-6511-2025-4-2-6-19

ABSTRACT. The article describes the parameters of geographical thinking and geographical imagination of the 1920s and the analyses their representations in the «poetry of battles and crusades» which if defined in artistic coordinates was the neo-romantic type poetry and in the regional socio-literary context (we are talking about the Urals) – Komsomol poetry. The 1920s soviet geography permeated with international ideas was shaped by the expectation of a world revolution and military campaigns beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. That is why it did not coincide with a world political and administrative map, offset the significance of state, cultural and other borders and thought rather of frontiers, border zones with landscape, natural or cultural features but at the same time potentially included in the processes of class struggle, change of power/system and subsequent Sovietization. The expectation of a global revolution and at the same time nostalgia for the events of the Civil War which were pushed back with each passing year explains the interest of Komsomol poetry in the Urals of the 1920s (we are talking about such poets as S. Vasiliev, E. Vechtomova, I. Keller, V. Makarov, V. Molchanov, G. Troitsky, V. Shipulin and others) to geography as well as its wide representation in poetic texts (regions, topoi, landscapes, etc.). Hence there was a demand in this poetry for memorial (historically concretized) and militaristic (located mostly in the imaginary zone) discourses differently assembling the historical and geographical, the real and the imaginary but on the whole verifying the present through revolutionary ideals and the romance of armed struggle.

KEYWORDS: geographical imagination, internationalism, revolutionary geography, neo-romanticism, Soviet poetry of the 1920s, Komsomol poetry of the Urals

For citation: Podlubnova Yu. S. [«Here the Dashing Death Will Soon Play with the Crumpled Feather Grass». Geography and Geographical Imagination in the Komsomol Poetry of the Urals in the 1920s]. Istoriko-geograficheskiy zhurnal [Historical Geography Journal], 2025, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 6–19. DOI: 10.58529/2782-6511-2024-4-1-6-19 (In Russian).

Received 23 January 2025
Accepted 15 May 2025

© 2025 The Author

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