Water History

, Volume 9, Issue 3, pp 337–359 | Cite as

From dry hell to blossoming garden: metaphors and poetry in Soviet irrigation literature on the Hungry Steppe, 1950–1980

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Abstract

This paper explores scientific and popular literature published on irrigation development in the former Soviet Union for its forms of narration. It asks why and how authors writing on irrigation development for a specialized, but also a general Soviet audience chose to alternate between factual prose, and metaphors and poetry. The analysis centers on two passages stemming from Russian-language books published in the Soviet Union in 1957 and 1963, respectively. Both of them describe irrigation development on the Hungry Steppe, a large rolling plain which today is part of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. The paper starts from the assumption that factual prose is likely to be expected in scientific and popular literature given the dominant perception of irrigation as engineering and prevailing discourses of scientific rationality and technological progress in the Soviet Union of this period. However, findings indicate that metaphors and poetry were an important form of narration for portraying the large-scale transformation of society and nature in scientific and popular literature. The paper argues that they served to reinforce discourses of scientific rationality and technological progress, but at the same time opened up semantic spaces to deconstruct and undermine them.

Keywords

Irrigation history Metaphors Poetry Hungry Steppe Soviet Union 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

Funding for fieldwork and writing of this paper was provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) in the framework of an Ambizione Grant (2010–2013). A draft of this paper was presented at the Water History Conference 2015 in Delft, Netherlands. The author especially wishes to thank Julia Obertreis for the many fruitful discussions on the subject of this paper. Warm thanks also go to Julie Kurth for her assistance in processing empirical data, to Ekaterina Filep for her help with translations, and to Magali Bonne-Moreau for her support with language editing. I thank Jane Costlow and Arja Rosenholm, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive comments on this paper. All possible errors, naturally, remain my own responsibility.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Geography Unit, Department of GeosciencesUniversity of FribourgFribourgSwitzerland

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