An Atlantis discovered: Riga’s Moskovskii forshtadt in the Russophone interwar imagination

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article relates literary and journalistic representations of Riga’s historic Russophone neighborhood, the Moskоvskii forshtadt, to the interwar conversation on the future of ‘Russia’ outside of the Soviet Union. My analysis begins with a close reading of Georgii Ivanov’s sketch, ‘Moskovskii Forshtadt.’ I then contrast Ivanov’s sketch with local Latvian Russophone accounts of the forshtadt, published in the Riga newspapers Segodnya and Segodnya vecherom. In studying representations and discourses, I reveal how the discursive space generated by the forshtadt contains three different understandings of Russian nationhood in its diasporic, extraterritorial existence of the interwar period.