Hyperreality in the Black Sea: Fictions of Crimea in novels by Lev Tolstoy and Vasily Aksyonov

During and immediately after the crisis that resulted in Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, a number of commentators in the US media referenced Lev Tolstoy’s Sebastopol Sketches and Vasily Aksyonov’s The Island of Crimea as works of literary fiction that helped to explain or even predicted present-day events. Although there is some superficial truth to such statements, both works are actually far more interested in exposing and undermining processes that distorted the reality of Crimea – historical in Tolstoy’s case, speculative in Aksyonov’s – in the service of Russian nationalism. The 2014 crisis was just one of many instances in the past three centuries that involved the use of a “hyperreal” rhetoric of kinship that ostensibly binds the fates of Crimea and Russia together. Rather than simply offering a particularised political commentary on past, present, and future Crimean-Russian relations, both Tolstoy and Aksyonov used Crimea as a fictionalised setting for their critique of the folly of such cynically “imagined geographies” in general.