Angela Brintlinger, Ohio State University
In 1934 when Ivan Bunin won the Nobel Prize for literature, Russian emigre communities throughout the world received a welcome boost in cultural prestige and legitimacy. The rest of the world had to acknowledge that this writer, in exile from his homeland, represented another country, the Russian diaspora or "Russia Abroad," as it came to be called.
The cultural configuration of Russia Abroad relied on outreach efforts to both Russians and the host cultures in which they found themselves after the 1917 Revolution in order to stake a certain claim for hegemony over the concept of Russianness, even though political hegemony now belonged, irretrievably it seemed, to the Soviet state.
One tool of this cultural entity was the "Days of Russian Culture," a celebration of Russian identity which took place every year from Paris to Harbin and from Helsinki to Damascus.
Drawing upon archival materials from the 1930s "Days of Russian Culture," I will argue in my paper that Russian emigres were searching for a 'useable past' in the face of a difficult present and an uncertain future. Further, they found that past in their cultural patrimony, specifically in their literary forbears. Through Bunin -- and Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, among others -- Russian emigres sought to legitimate their culture in the eyes of the West and to wrench cultural hegemony from the arms of the Soviets.