A Space for the Subject: Tracing Garden Culture in Muslim Russia

Alfrid K Bustanov

doi:10.1163/15685209-12341563

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the place occupied by garden culture in the mental landscape of Russia’s Muslims from the early nineteenth century to the late Socialist era. First taken from the Qur’an as a symbol of eternal salvation, the idea that gardens might embody both aesthetic and metaphysical values was further articulated by traveling missionaries with Sufi affiliations. This idea was afterwards absorbed by the generation of students graduated from Central Asian madrasas who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, brought the fashion for having gardens back to their home villages in European Russia. Gardens built or imagined by Muslims in European Russia had a history of their own, developing from the classical vision of heavenly gardens in Qur’anic exegesis into what became a central spatial category in Sufi tradition. In post-war Soviet Russia a place of piety was rethought as dacha—the entire process reflecting the evolution of Muslim subjectivity over the last few centuries.

Highlights

A Spatial Archive of Feelings1This article looks at gardens as a defining space for Muslim private life in Russia
This article examines the place occupied by garden culture in the mental landscape of Russia’s Muslims from the early nineteenth century to the late Socialist era
This idea was afterwards absorbed by the generation of students graduated from Central Asian madrasas who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, brought the fashion for having gardens back to their home villages in European Russia

Summary

This article is part of the research project MIND

The Muslim Individual in Imperial and Soviet Russia, carried out at the University of Amsterdam and funded by the European Research. The goal of this article is to outline a brief history of the garden in Muslim Russia as both a literary symbol and as a physical space, described by both the textual and visual means in the period between the nineteenth century and the Brezhnev Stagnation era. Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, JESHO 65 (2022) 74–125 Bustanov those individuals experienced emotions; culturally defined emotional regimes made up the very core of the self.. The local context emerges through the use of dialect words, as well as popular language, images and emotional regimes, wellknown to students of Tatar folklore It must be acknowledged, that due to the Soviet nation-building efforts, this folkloric layer has received much greater attention than the cosmopolitan poetic heritage, presumably because the former suits the national narrative while the latter is not amenable to the clear-cut models of Soviet national cultures. An encyclopedic compendium titled The Proof of God’s Unity (Burhan-i Tawhid), a 1700-page theological treatise, was

12 For a collection of English translations

29 On the author

67 For example

89 For example

Conclusion