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Political, Social, And Personal: The Encounters of the Russian Emigration in Yugoslavia, 1921-1941 (Essay)
Introduction Writing in a war-torn Belgrade in 1948, Nobel Prize novelist Ivo Andric (1892-1975) describes an idyllic moment set in the late interwar period of the Yugoslav capital in his short story "Zeko": "In the narrow field of green tusks, here is a light oasis. A man is rowing, sitting in the middle of the boat, on his head a cotton hat, the skin on his hands and shoulders sunburned and red, and on the bow a beautiful woman, in a purplish swimsuit, with noticeably glorious stretched-out legs. She'd put up a sun umbrella; she must have been a Russian emigre." (1) Although the story of Russian emigres (2) from the Russian Revolution, in Yugoslavia (3) had largely been completed by 1948--by virtue of assimilation, relocation, wartime casualty, or displacement under Tito's communist regime--the community had left an impression on Yugoslav history, an impression strong enough to merit a place in Andric's revolving cast of local characters. By the postwar period, the emigres can no longer be considered a separate community within Yugoslavia: their narratives had become interwoven into the multi-ethnic, multi-national, multi-confessional Yugoslav fabric. Yet the process of the Russian emigres' integration in the nascent Yugoslavia in the early 1920s--in fact, the interaction of the Russian and Yugoslav, predominantly Serbian, elements--is a history of encounters. (4)
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