The continental unconscious
When I first suggested the idea of a contemporary art exhibition about the “Finno-Ugrian World” my Estonian colleagues were appalled. Why spend time in those remote places, which even specialists describe as “the periphery of the periphery”? Why stir up ethnocentric sentiments among the Estonians? Why revive an agenda of cultural cooperation from the dark Soviet seventies, when Estonian intellectuals became infatuated with Finno-Ugrian mythology and bonded with their faraway kin?
From ‘The continental unconscious‘, an articulate, accessible and thoroughly rewarding article by Anders Kreuger, originally published in A Prior Magazine (16, 2008), and reproduced at Eurozine.com. Anders subtly debunks fanciful linguistic theories, and explores Russia’s uneasy relationship to its aboriginal populations, by means of a topography of the unconscious. He combines his curator’s travelogue-cum-history of Mordvinia, Udmurtia, Mari El and Komi, synonymous for many Russians with Gulag territories but otherwise off the ‘mental map’, with a healthy critique of centralist ‘large-scale production of literature for small peoples’ (and its attendant violence), and of language revivalists’ tendency to be ‘populist and about nothing; carnivalesque, but hardly dialogical’, with an acute awareness of new and old forms of collectivism, occultism, territorial violation, and the long arm of Moscow. Highly recommended.