Mapping Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia 1914-1922 (MAPRR)
MAPRR's Purpose and Key Concepts
From MAPRR's website: "In the cataclysmic nine years from 1914 to 1922, tsarist Russia disappeared from the map, fragmenting into regions, cities, and villages as an entire empire split into battle zones. This website helps us capture a shifting sense of self and attachment to a place through a database more than 600 poems and short prose composed during these war years by 70 writers."
MAPRR describes self and place through "place-based concepts" (PBCs) that describe the relationship between our emotions, identities, and how we see the world around us.Its subject is the writings of Russian poets, essays, and dramatists, many of whom are largely unknown ourside of the project.
MAPRR offers tools to explore how famous and everyday Russians experienced their home country and cities change drastically over the period of the First World War and Russian Civil War. Of special note are the analytical graphs, which represent in a visual and interactive medium the connections between PBCs, historical people, geographic locations and the literary culture of the time. English translations are provided for certain popular or impactful works.
The People Behind the Poetry
My firsts tasks for MAPRR revolved around developing a biographical database for the people at the center of the project. This information serves as a component of analysis for internal and public-facing research. With an understanding of a writer's lifespan, personal and professional affiliations, political and economic origins, and other important facets of their identities, we can better understand the context surrounding their works. These attributes make up agent (people) pages (330+ and counting!) and help with various analytical tools on the site.
For some writers, like Anna Akhmatova (A1), MAPRR is just another collection of well-known data. For many other authors, however, MAPRR is the most comprehensive of very few available sources of information, and for this group, it is likely the only English-language resource available at all. Some cases proved successful in collecting sufficient sources, such as Nikolai Vlasov (A71). On the other hand, some names will probably haunt me for a long time because I can make little more than educated guesses about most of their lives, even their names, such as M. Did (A21) and V. Gret (A31).
Last modified: Mon Nov 27 2023