Beautiful Spaces
This is a history of Crimea, though it is not the kind of history you have likely encountered before. Rather than reconstructing political events or cultural developments, this project puts the idea of location front and center. It attempts to reconstruct the places of Crimea in the years after the first Russian annexation in April 1783. It explores the value of distance and proximity, density and diffusion, access and isolation, as tools of historical analysis. In so doing, it sheds light on the ways in which the built and natural environments shaped daily life in (arguably) the most beautiful corner of the tsarist empire.
Why "Beautiful Spaces"?
It is hard to come up with a pair of concepts as evocative and as subjective as "beauty" and "space." Combine them, and you have a concept that seems, at first glance, to defy definition. Then again, combine them, and you have a concept which, on second thought, functions as a uniquely powerful tool for making sense of a historical terrain in which every square inch was continually claimed and contested, subject to ruin and reinvention.In Crimea, topography and aesthetics were major themes in nearly every travel account composed between the middle of the eighteenth century and the turn of the twentieth. Government officials spent decades asking "where" questions, documenting locations, and creating new (administrative and cultural) spaces. Land was the medium through which Crimean Tatars and Greeks negotiated privileges (and obligations) from the imperial state. Lucrative, ideologically productive spaces - such as gardens and ruins - shaped the way Russian subjects conceptualized Crimea for more than a century.
In fact, we cannot understand Crimea without understanding what constituted beauty in this small corner of the empire. Beautiful Spaces argues that beauty in this part of the world was fickle. It could be associated in one breath with the majesty of cliffs rising from the Black Sea or the luxurious vineyards of the river valleys, and with the landscape of decrepitude and ruin in the next breath. In Crimea, beauty was complex and ephemeral, simple and timeless, visible and imagined.
