Urbis et Orbis: Mikroistoriâ i Semiotika Goroda (Jun 2024)
The image of Yerevan in the context of postcolonial discourse in Yuri Karabchievsky's “Yearning for Armenia”
Abstract
Armenia has been incorporated into Russia or under its “protectorate” for two centuries. Throughout this period, a substantial body of texts about Armenia has emerged in prose and poetry, highlighting the distinctive “Armenian text” as a metatext within Russian literature. However, Yuri Karabchievsky’s novella “Longing for Armenia” (1978), which could not be published in Russia until the times of Perestroika, is considered the first work to explore Armenia's colonial status and contain key motifs of post-colonial text: loss of territories, loss of history and culture, language, etc. The impact of Armenization is evident, notably in the capital city, Yerevan, portrayed as a space marked by impermanence, foreignness, contradiction, and negligence. An analysis of the novella’s central themes, characters, thoughts, and emotions related to Yerevan leads to the conclusion that Yerevan is inherently “non-Armenian,” bearing a profound colonial imprint in organizational structure and spatial symbolism, primarily in its architectural aspect. Furthermore, this article places significant emphasis on Soviet symbols and presence in Yerevan, as well as the role of the Armenian language in the city’s culture and space. Yerevan emerges as a city harboring a melancholy for a lost and estranged ancient past, whose specifics remain elusive, partly due to the suppression of the language of that past. It also yearns for a present and future in which Armenia has not forfeited its culture and history. Despite Yerevan’s failure to conform to the status of the capital of an ancient nation, the changes occurring in the city during the protagonist's lifetime in Karabchievsky’s novella offer hope for the revival of such a Yerevan and Armenia – longed for by the novella’s main characters and cherished by many.
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