Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity by Rory Finnin (review)

Reviewed by: Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity by Rory Finnin Marko Pavlyshyn Finnin, Rory. Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2022, xii + 334 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $80.00 (hardback & e-book). This superb book is both innovative and traditionalist. Innovative, in that it places the unjustly neglected theme of Crimea and Crimean Tatars at the centre of a complex and fascinating study of connections and antagonisms between the cultures of Crimea itself, Ukraine, Russia and Turkey. Traditionalist, because it reaffirms with conviction, eloquence and force a proposition seldom [End Page 549] articulated in a sceptical age: that literature and works of the imagination more generally can, and in special circumstances do, conceive, model and propel social and political change for the good. The central theme of the book is the resonance in four of the cultures of the Black Sea littoral of one of the Soviet Union's genocidal acts: the deportation in 1944 of the Crimean Tatar people from their homeland and the attendant endeavour to extinguish Crimean Tatar identity. This theme also organizes the book's symmetrical tripartite structure, constituting as it does the main content of its second and longest part, 'Dispossession'. The first part of Blood of Others, 'Possession', scans the preceding cultural histories of Crimea and the Crimean Tatar presence there before and during the peninsula's incorporation into the Russian Empire and, thereafter, the USSR. The third part considers developments since 1989, when the self-repatriation of Crimean Tatars became possible. The title of this final part, 'Repossession', captures two processes opposite in cultural meaning and ethical justification: the return of many Crimean Tatars to their homeland, and the Russian Federation's illegal seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. In each of the parts the evolution of four cultures' understandings and representations of Crimea and Crimean Tatars, as well as the ways in which these representations influenced each other, are illuminated by Finnin's close readings of works of poetry and literary prose, but also of film, drama, music and the visual arts. Since the focus of the study is the capacity of works of the imagination to influence the sentiments and ethical dispositions of their recipients, Finnin explicitly affords works of 'high' and popular culture equal attention. The analyses themselves bear witness to Finnin's rare and admirable erudition in languages and cultural traditions seldom studied together. Such breadth of expertise enables revealing comparisons and observations of intertextual connection. Thus, for example, Crimean Tatar poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Hasan Çergeyev and Üsein Samil Toktargazy is considered alongside the Crimean-themed works of, respectively, the Ukrainian writers Lesia Ukraïnka and Mykhailo Kotsiubyns'kyi; the role of Crimean Tatar subject matter in advocacy for various forms of pan-Turkism is demonstrated in discussions of Ottoman and Turkish texts — Namık Kemal's novel Cezmi (1880) and Cengiz Dağcı's popular prose of the 1950s and 1960s. Not unexpectedly, Crimea as refracted through Russian culture in its colonial as well as oppositional variants looms large in the overall picture. Pushkin's poem, 'The Fountain of Bağçasaray', is examined as the most familiar and historically generative formulation of the idea of a Crimea alienated from its Crimean Tatar history and stripped down to its alluring landscape, a place open for imperial appropriation. At various points in the book Finnin observes intertextual — generally polemical — rejoinders to Pushkin's poem from each [End Page 550] of the cultures under discussion. The unavoidable omnipresence of Pushkin in the book serves as a reminder of the aporia of scholarly engagement with cultural colonialism: even as one deconstructs the metropolitan text, one inevitably reinforces its visibility and canonicity. A similarly poignant irony attends Finnin's leitmotivic invocation of the poet Boris Chichibabin and his poem, 'Crimean Strolls'. The book begins with an account of the poet's awe-inducing reading of the poem in Kharkiv in 1963. The poem not only named what was then unnameable — the Soviet crime of the deportation of the Crimean...

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