ABSTRACT

The "new mobilities paradigm" which emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century has identified mobility as a process intrinsic to the human experience and fundamental to the formation of social and political structures. This volume breaks new ground by demonstrating the role of the journey as a key motor of human development in Russia, central and east Europe in the modern period. It does so by means of twelve case studies that examine different types of movement, both voluntary and involuntary, temporary and permanent, short- and long-distance, into, out of, and around the region.

chapter 1|14 pages

From travel to mobility

Perspectives on journeys in the Russian, Central and East European past

part I|54 pages

Journeys into and around Russia

chapter 2|15 pages

The threshold of Siberia

Tracing migrant experiences in Perm Province during the long nineteenth century

chapter 4|11 pages

Alone in the Steppes

Carla Serena in the peripheries of the Russian Empire

chapter 5|12 pages

The Cold War gaze before and after 1991

Reflections on selected travellers’ accounts of the Soviet Union and Russia since 1956

part II|54 pages

Journeys out of Russia

chapter 6|12 pages

Escaping Russian serfdom

Peasant flight to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the eighteenth century

chapter 7|12 pages

Conquest journeys and their legacies

Aleksandr Suvorov in Russia and Transnistria

chapter 8|13 pages

A struggle across the Iron Curtain

Soviet dissidents in exile in the 1970s

chapter 9|15 pages

Okno v prostor

Konstantin Balmont in Japan 1

part III|51 pages

Journeys by Eastern and Central Europeans

chapter 10|12 pages

Modernist empire

Hermann Bahr’s journey to Dalmatia

chapter 11|15 pages

Rákosi’s travels

A Hungarian Communist’s journey to the West

chapter 12|11 pages

Exile and champion of the disabled

Dorina Ilieva-Simpson’s journey from Bulgaria to Mauritius 1

chapter 13|11 pages

Journeys as grief work

German expellees and “homesick tourism” in Poland (1945–1989)