Dreams of Constantinople in the Work of Ilia Zdanevich (Iliazd)

This paper examines the significance of Constantinople in the work of the Georgian-Russian-French avantgarde author and book artist Ilia Zdanevich (1894–1975, pseudonym Iliazd). Zdanevich spent a year in Constantinople in 1920–21, in transit between his hometown of Tbilisi and his ultimate destination of Paris. He was to reside in France for the rest of his life, but this temporary period of displacement in Constantinople proved to be formative, serving as material for his later works. This paper will examine the depiction of Constantinople in his Letters to Morgan Philips Price. Written in 1929 and unpublished for nearly eight decades, Iliazd’s fictionalized letters to a friend both capture and critically reflect on what has been called Constantinople’s “Russian moment,” when the Ottoman capital was under Allied occupation and its population swelled with the influx of former subjects of the Russian Empire fleeing the Bolsheviks and the Russian Civil War. The paper analyzes how the epistolary genre gives form and expression to Zdanevich’s experiences of Constantinople in this turbulent and pivotal period.