When Literary Space Parts Ways with Physical Geography: Substitutions by Aksyonov and Morchiladze for Missing Islands of the Black Sea

Abstract

Whereas numerous islands served as stepping stones in connecting the lands surrounding the Mediterranean, their conspicuous absence in the Black Sea became a formidable obstacle in an already notoriously inhospitable sea. The Black Sea has only very few islands, and fewer of them are inhabited by only a small number of people. Even so, this makes all the more relevant for us the important role the ‘missing’ islands can play albeit in a literary and not geographical space. This paper explores two path-breaking novels that deliberately contest the historical legacies of Black Sea geography by inventing and introducing islands that incite the reader’s imagination for a critical reflection on the other courses history could have taken, in other words, what the historians and social scientists call ‘historical alternatives’ or ‘alternative history’. This paper focuses on The Island of Crimea by Vassily Aksyonov (1981, 1983) and Santa Esperanza by Aka Morchiladze (2004, 2006). The former engages the reader on a counterfactual exercise with Crimea becoming an island off the coast of Soviet Russia, inspired by Communist China troubled by a maverick Taiwan at arm’s length. The latter has a more nuanced formulation where a British dominion of three islands comes into being after the Crimean War and survives as safe haven for multicultural coexistence despite the fragilities imposed upon it across the sea. Fictive islands can thus occasionally play a greater role than real islands in remaking history.