A New Map for Everything: Centering Azerbaijan in Aleksandr Ilichevsky’s 'The Persian'

• In Event: Images of Transition in Post-Soviet Visual and Narrative Culture

Abstract

The transition from the Soviet to the Post-Soviet is not only a historical, but crucially also a spatial event: The emergence of new nation states and thus the shifting of cultural hierarchies between them require new images and mental cartographies of the spatial make-up of the now post-Soviet world.
Aleksandr Ilichevsky’s novel The Persian (Pers; 2016) attempts just such a re-imagination of post-Soviet cartographies. When its protagonist Ilya, a Baku-born geologist who emigrated to the United States after the Soviet Union’s collapse, returns to his hometown, he not only encounters the remnants of the Soviet petrol industry that shaped his childhood. In fact, he is determined to locate the “Last Universal Common Ancestor” (LUCA), a hypothetical micro-organism that supposedly holds DNA common to all life on earth, in the oil reserves underneath Azerbaijan’s soil.
This talk will flesh out how The Persian employs Ilya’s search for LUCA to contest Russo-centric cartographies of the post-Soviet world. In claiming Azerbaijan’s centrality to the emergence of all organic life on earth, the novel posits a counterpoint to the country’s former subaltern status as a peripheral site of resource extraction, allowing for the transition to a new emancipatory cultural cartography of the post-Soviet space.

Author

• Thomas Fritz Maier, U of Basel (Switzerland)