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SUMMARY:Sense of Place lecture series: &quot\;Sensing the Great ‘Yellow 
 Space’ of Soviet Central Asia: Depictions of the Kara-Kum Desert in the 
 Early 1930s&quot\;  - Katharine Holt\, University of St Andrews 
DTSTART:20160204T173000Z
DTEND:20160204T190000Z
UID:TALK62938@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:21355
DESCRIPTION:In 1933\, a road race between Moscow and the Kara-Kum Desert w
 as held to great fanfare in the Soviet Union. Within two years\, the write
 r Mikhail Loskutov had published two accounts of his involvement with it. 
 The second opens with an assertion: a cartographic visualization of his jo
 urney could never give his audience a proper sense of the ‘real earth’
  that he had visited. While it could designate with ‘yellow spaces’ th
 e two deserts he had passed through\, it could not represent the car engin
 es he had heard\, the bonfires he had seen\, the compound scent of gasolin
 e and sand that he had smelled.\nIn this talk\, I will discuss Loskutov’
 s travelogues in the context of what one critic has called the Soviet ‘c
 ultural obsession’ with the Kara-Kum in the early 1930s. At the heart of
  my talk will be an investigation of how a set of literary works from this
  period defined the Kara-Kum as both a mappable desert (one of Loskutov’
 s ‘yellow spaces’) and as experienceable sands. I will explore what wa
 s at stake poetically and politically in attending to the space as a mater
 ial site\, tracking what kind of subjects were being invited to interact w
 ith the desert’s particles and physically transform them—along with th
 e flora\, fauna\, and human inhabitants they supported—into an ‘oasis 
 of socialism.’\nMy focus in this talk will be on a set of literary texts
  from 1930-1935\, but I will contextualize my findings with reference to s
 everal Soviet films shot in Central Asia during the same period. Moreover\
 , I will offer thoughts on how the depiction of the Kara-Kum in the early 
 1930s relates to the evolution of Central Asia’s place in the Russian/So
 viet imaginary over the last 150 years.\n \nBiography: A Lecturer in Russi
 an at the University of St Andrews\, Katharine Holt is currently at work o
 n a monograph about how the deserts of Central Asia were represented in ea
 rly Soviet culture.
LOCATION:Umney Theatre\, Robinson College\, Cambridge
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