Dreams of Minsk

A Journey through Aesthetics of Utopia within a European Experience

Authors

  • Heloisa Rojas Gomez European University Institute

Keywords:

Minsk, utopia, city, text, semiotics

Abstract

Minsk, the capital city of Belarus, is in search of a cultural text. As writers and artists have done for many today iconic cities, Artur Klinau provides Minsk with such text, in his book Minsk: The Sun City of Dream. The aim of the present article is to explore and interpret this text, approaching it through cultural semiotics. 

In Klinau’s literary work, notions of architecture, art, history, philosophy intertwine with personal memory and aesthetic experiences, drawing the exceptional image of a Soviet utopian city with a soul of “provincial sentimentalism”. At the periphery of the Russian and then Soviet Empires, after the Cold War East-West divide, Minsk developed a nostalgia “for something which is not”: Europe. This text shows how Minsk, with its ‘Eastern’ heritage, is instead deeply rooted in Europe. 

Addressing many aspects of Minsk’s and Belarus’ historical identity, Klinau shows also the tension between the city and the Empire, manifesting its coercion on the urban space in various forms, in a dialectic relation with philosophic and aesthetic traditions of Utopia. As a result, the proposed text bridges between “actual Minsk” and “potential or desired Minsk”, finally letting the city’s oppressed ego meet with its own manifestation.

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Author Biography

Heloisa Rojas Gomez, European University Institute

Heloisa Rojas Gomez is a doctoral student at the Department of History and Civilization of the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). She holds a Master of Arts in Russian and Eastern European Studies from the Jagiellonian University (Krakow, Poland), where she has worked on cultural semiotics and urban studies in late Russian Imperial and Soviet contexts.

 Her current research adopts a microhistorical approach and focuses on the Italian migration to the Russian Imperial Black Sea region, looking for the intersection among regimes of subjecthood, citizenship and the empire, within a provincial urban setting.  She is also active in public history as coordinator of a research project on Italian war prisoners in Soviet Gulags, which aims at shading light on new documents, memory and the prisoners’ family stories. 

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Published

2017-12-01

How to Cite

Rojas Gomez, H. (2017). Dreams of Minsk: A Journey through Aesthetics of Utopia within a European Experience. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 3(2), 240–285. Retrieved from https://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/221