From the Editors

11 Ab Imperio, 2/2009 From the EDITORS Spaces and times inhabited by the subjects of the articles in this issue are extraordinarily diverse. They stretch from the territory of Siberian penal colonies to the Tsar’s chambers, and from the imperial and Soviet cities to the Buriat steppes and post-Soviet Mongolia, which has not yet separated its new project of an independent state from its Soviet past. Imperial diversity represented in these instances cannot be reduced to a system of imperial administration and multi-ethnicity. Having chosen real and constructed space and time as our research framework we strove for the articles to form an inter-text, in which a view from the capital of the empire, from its dynastic center, could co-exist synchronically with a view from the periphery, from beyond the cultural boundary, so that imperial biographies of the elite could co-exist with those of non-elite components of the imperial society. In the inter-text that results time and space are not just a background for biographies and historical studies. The imperial chronotop forms biographies of people who literally inhabit the semiotically overcharged “space of power” (Ekaterina Boltunova’s article); who colonize this chronotope from within by projecting onto it visions of a sacral empire sanctified by the Buddhist tradition (Nikolai Tsyrempilov’s article); or who re-produce imperial practices of social segregation and self-organization in the upside-down time and space of the penal colony (article by Andrew Gentes). Time in empire acquires features of heterogeneity and is perceived as religiously or nationally determined when imperial collective subjects face the problem of centralization and unification of the calendar. If people “simply” live 12 From the Editors in individual “natural” time and simultaneously inhabit a collective time, which is often socially and politically colored, then historians who are out to study these people’s lives cannot expect anything “simple” and “natural.” Heterogeneity of time can be a usual part of one’s individual life in empire, it can be recognized or ignored by the historical actor, but a historian must include time as a component in her research model and to seek such a modus of narrating that would reflect the heterogeneity of the imperial chronotope (Svetlana Malycheva’s article). In certain situations the empire’s subjects and promoters clearly feel that they are part of processes of imperialism and colonialism: their biographies and self-perceptions are structured by this sharp recognition of the divided time and space (articles by Bakhtiyar Babajanov, Aleksei Mikhalev, Serhy Yekelchyk). In some other situations imperial subjects simply do not see some evident features of that space. This latter characteristic, which Ann Stoler called “imperial dispositions of ignoring,” is as important an instrument of forming individual biographies in empire as a rationalized desire to write one’s own life into the fabric of larger imperial history. “Dispositions of ignoring” help “straighten” those highly ambivalent imperial biographies connected with moves and changes of lifestyles and surroundings, with perceptions of society as segregated and oneself as included into different types of contacts with “high” and “low,” “civilized” and “uncivilized,” “one’s own” and “alien” layers of that imperial society. The presence of borderland spaces in empire facilitates individual choices of “destiny,” which is clearly reflected in biographies of “borderland personalities” such as Henryk Głębocki’s subject of research – Polish nationalist and imperial patriot, Count Adam Gurowski. The dynamics of individual perception and ignoring of the imperial chronotop and of one’s own multi-dimensional social personality both in historical experience and in the historian’s method is the most interesting aspect of this issue’s articles. Editors of Ab Imperio: I. Gerasimov S. Glebov A. Kaplunovski M. Mogilner A. Semyonov ...