Imaginations, interactions, and realities

Abstract

During Russia’s Great Northern War with Sweden, numerous Swedish prisoners of war were sent into internal exile to Siberia. Recent scholars have built upon Bhabha’s work to understand the ways in which this “othering” process influences the formation of modern identities. Since the 1990s, there has been considerable effort to understand the demographic pluralities of Russian Asia, and the contemporary challenges of small ethnolinguistic groups maintaining their identity throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet era. Chechesh Kudachinova’s chapter continues the investigation into how Asia was imagined by exploring the varying ways that the Altai region has been described in the Russian cultural sphere and the historical resilience of one of its most well-known monikers: the Golden Mountains. Naomi Caffee’s chapter then brings the volume into the Soviet era by investigating two writers whose works, as well as their tragic fate under Joseph Stalin, formed the genesis of the Sakha national literary tradition.