Spaces of the Diaspora: urban form and cultural practices of Russian immigrants in Europe and Asia in the first half of the twentieth century

The following dissertation is a survey of the Russian diaspora in three key destinations in Asia and Europe, from the 1920s through the Second World War. Written testimony of the émigrés, vividly colored by cultural bias yet intensely, objectively engaged in the details of city life, offers useful understandings of the urban form and social fabric. This study follows a spatial approach and compares three cities – Berlin, Istanbul (Constantinople) and Shanghai – in accordance with the same criteria. The focus is on the physical and cultural impact refugees had on their environment, the plotting of each city expressed in the exiles’ literary output, and new historical and geographical information extracted from these texts. An analysis of outstanding examples of émigré city writing informs the case studies for each location: the Constantinople diaries of Alexis Gritchenko and autobiographical fiction of Ilia Zdanevich; the Berlin poetry of Jacques Noir; the Shanghai travelogue of Petr Lapiken and the modernist city novel of Sergey Alymov.