Another Europe? Russia through the Eyes of French Travel Writers (ХХ-ХХI centuries): Lecture by Martina Stemberger

The Austrian researcher will present her paper "Another Europe? Russia through the Eyes of French Travel Writers (XX-XXI centuries)".
Abstract: 

From a French point of view, Russia has traditionally been one of those "fundamental others" supporting, by contrast, the definition and affirmation of one’s own identity. Through generations and political peripeties, French discourse about (pre-revolutionary, Soviet, contemporary) Russia creates the image of an "anti-France", an "other Europe". How to comprehend the "Europeanness", and how the "otherness" of this "Autre Europe", reflected by French writers and travelers of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, and opposed, in L. Durtain’s eponymous travelogue (1928), to "real Europe"? At a time when "Europe", in political and mass media discourse, is too often (ab)used as a synonym of the "EU", a vast corpus of French travelogues invites an in-depth comparative analysis of the discourse about Russia as an "other Europe" in its cultural and historical context, as well as against the background of Russian self-identifications and self-localizations outside, on the periphery of or within a polyvalent "Europe", the idea of a "Europe" extending – this is the "paradoxical conclusion" of D. Sallenave’s Trans-Siberian travelogue (2012) – "from London to Vladivostok".