'Everything Must Be Relearnt Again': Ella Maillart’s Investigations of Emancipation in Soviet Central Asia

• In Event: To Write and to Roam: Ambiguous Liberations and the Travelogue

Abstract

Writing about her travels in Central Asia in 1932, the Swiss adventurer Ella Maillart (1903–1997) repeatedly invokes a romanticized fascination with the region’s nature, nomadic population, and histories of conquest, themes which also permeate the photographs taken with her Leica camera on this journey. Though the title of her published travelogue, Turkestan Solo (1934), foregrounds a defiant individualism, the text reveals a complex matrix of influences, both Soviet and European. Her first visit to the Soviet Union was sparked by Vsevolod Pudovkin’s film Storm over Asia, a fictional narrative of anti-colonial struggle, which she saw in Berlin soon after its release in 1928. In her writing, she frames her restless wanderings as a personal journey in search of liberation and as a rejection of European civilization following the devastations of the First World War. Despite claiming an apolitical stance, she sought to investigate the lived realities behind Soviet policies of emancipation in Central Asia—specifically, as they impacted women and ethnic minorities in this formerly colonized region. Her photographs reveal the persistence of imperial tropes despite her critical stance, as well as the larger contradictions at work in her self-representation. They also provide a record of Soviet repression, as she documented a trial of basmachi leaders sentenced to death in Samarkand. Drawing on a close study of her negatives, travel notebooks, and published writings, this paper proposes a new reading of her photographs in light of the contested legacies of Soviet liberation for Uzbek national identity today.

Author

• Alexandra Dennett, Harvard U