'In the Home of the Last Emperor': Gender and Post-Imperiality in August Cesarec’s 'Today’s Russia'

• In Event: Gender and Post-Imperial Legacy in Early 20th Century East and Southeast Europe

Abstract

The diffuse and in many ways hybrid collection of travel writings Today’s Russia by the legendary Croatian Marxist writer and revolutionary August Cesarec (1893-1941) chronicles the author’s three-year (1934-1937) travels across the USSR. Narratively framed mostly as a series of journalism-style reportages and interviews with common people, Russia Today brings forth an enthusiastic portrayal of Soviet economic, cultural, scientific and technological breakthroughs that was meant to popularize socialism in Yugoslavia, the author’s home country. In this presentation, I will explore the ways in which Cesarec’s idealistic picture of the Soviet Union relies upon his interconnected engagements with gender and cultural memory of the bygone Russian Empire. On the one hand, this presentation will analyze representations of the many emancipated women Cesarec’s narrator encounters and interviews. These women teachers, metallurgists, artists, and politicians function in the travelogue as a powerful symbol of socialist modernity and are, furthermore, often brought into conjunction with the topic of Soviet’s modernizing approach to gender-related issues such as abortion and divorce. On the other hand, the paper will trace Cesarec’s continual thematization of symbolic and material remnants of the Russian empire and analyze the way in which the cultural memory of the overturned imperial past drives the seemingly unstoppable socialist future.

Author

• Slaven Crnic, U of Rijeka (Croatia)