Fifteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

On February 26, 2022, The Observer published a cartoon entitled “The Russian Bear Advances on Kyiv.” The 2022 invasion of Ukraine was preceded by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. This war over contested land and ethnic affiliations evokes the memory of an earlier war, a major crisis over borderlands in the mid 19th century that contained the roots of the present conflict—the Crimean War of 1853-1856. In 1869, French writer Prosper Mérimée wrote Lokis, a tale mixing vampirism with lycanthropy, which he read out loud to the Empress Eugenie and her friends. In Lokis, a Lithuanian aristocrat, Count Michael Szémioth, is revealed to be half-man, half-bear. The story connects Szémioth’s violence with the violence at Sevastopol in Crimea. I argue that Mérimée’s tale is a brilliant twist on the image of the “Russian Bear” which emerged in the media during the Crimean War in the lithographs of Honoré Daumier, and in Punch in Britain. The intertwined motifs of linguistics and lycanthropy in Lokis raise questions about the limits of the human, the connections between language, hybridity and violence, and the territorial conflicts between Turkey, Poland-Lithuania and Russia. My paper asks: how does the transformation of Count Szémioth in Lokis reimagine the political and cultural aftermath of the Crimean crisis and Russia’s drive to “Christianize” the region, as a result of the Russo-Turkish wars? How do the ramifications of this crisis continue to haunt us today as Russia attempts to build a “bridge” to the Crimea through Mariupol?