Poetics and (geo)politics of railways

Back in school, we learned that the construction of the railway at the beginning of the 19th century expressed great technological progress, thereby heralding a new era of traffic. Even after a long time, railway transport did not go out of fashion, in fact it improved technologically - the train is a beautiful reality that lasts.

However, a certain tradition of resistance to modern achievements did not bypass the appearance of the railway. "Iron snake", "a box that will explode from the inside" or "passengers suffocation by steam entering the carriages" were the panic warnings of those who met the railway traffic with doubts. Carriage driving was still considered the safest transportation achievement. And the most elegant - someone would add nostalgically.

The train, therefore, did not remain only the progress of a time, nor was it uninspiring for artists like some other technological innovations. On the contrary, the train has become an important subject of art - literature, music, painting, theater, all the way to film.

Travel - universe and myth

Train journeys are most often perceived as a theatrical scene. A predominantly moving scene of day or night travel. But also a stopped scene, for example at a major or secondary station, perhaps due to a machine failure or some other reason for the delay.

The train and the passengers with all possible complications in it became a whole world with many novel components. Potentially comic but also tragic, even romantic, adventurous, sometimes police. The latter are usually the consequences of some delict, let's say a mysterious one, which would most often happen while traveling at night.

Thus, traveling by train becomes a universe, a kind of myth and an ideal inspiration for the imagination and work of the artist. With the most common variations of the metaphor that life is like traveling by train - with stations, including the last one, transfers, tracks, entrances and exits, tunnels, disasters...

It is not easy to list the great works that were created with the theme of trains and travel, it is even more difficult to choose the best ones.

It remains a glorious piece of music Hector Berlioz "Song about the railway", composed in 1846, on the occasion of the opening of the Paris - Lille line.

The first film made in 1895 by the brothers Limier it was called "The arrival of the train at the station".

In French literature, train travel, with all its subtle associations, is a favorite theme Marcel Proust, especially in his memories in search of lost time. But also other French writers - Guy de Montpassan, Joseph Kessel, Georges Simenon.

Here we approach the English writer Agatha Christie who will become famous among the most translated writers in the world with her works in which mysterious plots and murders take place on the famous "Orient-Express" train.

Russian literature is also rich in the motif of train travel, its real and symbolic events and meanings. The oldest line in Russia was between Saint Petersburg and Moscow, built in 1851.

In the classic novel Leo Tolstoy In "Anna Karenina", the tragic end of the main character and her unhappy love ends with her being thrown under a train. That famous scene has been the subject of many artistic treatments.

Also in the denouement of this Tolstoy novel, there is a scene at the train station where Anna's lover Vronsky, disillusioned and shaken, takes the train to the battlefield, this time to the Balkans. It seems that there were always some wars there, and this time Tolstoy's hero Vronsky goes straight to the Serbian-Turkish war.

Danilo Kish found a certain connection between the railway and literature in his references to his father.

"For my relationship to literature, the fact that my father was a writer of an international timetable is not without significance: it is a whole cosmopolitan and literary heritage". Danilo Kiš - "Birth certificate (short biography")

In the latest book of the Montenegrin writer Balša Brković The novel "Aurora" begins at the Sarajevo railway station, then continues with a description of the characters and the first plots on the train that, in 1932, leaves Sarajevo for Nikšić.

"Pisak lokomitiva" is the title of a beautiful story with a mysterious ending Milenko Ratkovića, a famous Montenegrin children's writer, about a blind boy who would greet the train on the hilly line to Virpazar with his hand every day in the same place. Due to the success of this story, it was said that the name of the train driver Mitra, who would greet the boy with the whistle of the locomotive, was known in elementary schools throughout Yugoslavia.

Two trains and locomotives of history

In the continuation of our review, the train is not an object of art, even though the plot may resemble the writer's playful imagination, but rather the harsh facts of history.

The action takes place in Russia, and two real trains symbolize the beginning of the October Revolution.

Namely, at the end of March 1917, there was a forty-seven-year-old professional revolutionary in an armored car of a special train passing through the territory of Germany towards Russia. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In that train - whose organizational and political sponsor is the German General Staff, that is, the country that is at war with Russia at that moment - he travels with Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution rushes towards Petrograd.

On the same March, the Russian Tsar Nicholas II Romanov leaves Petrograd with his family by train, approaching the gray station in Pskov. The last stop of the imperial train. And the last stop in the life of the Russian emperor and his family.

Soon, with the arrival of Lenin and the departure of Tsar Nicholas II, "the days that shook the world" will begin, as an American journalist put it John Reed, a contemporary and witness of the revolution, addressed those events. Those were the days that shook Russia to its foundations or, in Sholokhov's words, shook human destinies in the country. And it is precisely human destinies, balances of life paths that should be the basis for evaluating the revolution, which was then called the "locomotive of history".

This story belongs to history, and the locomotives and revolutions of that era are now mostly found in museums.

Danilo Kiš, writing about the destinies of people in times and whirlwinds of revolutions that take place between great ideals and terror, tells young people: "Don't be obsessed with historical urgency and don't believe in the metaphor about the trains of history. So don't jump on the trains of history, because that's just a stupid metaphor". (Danilo Kiš, "Advice to a young writer").

Geopolitics of railways

It is considered, not without reason, that the railroad also united America. That the railroad is no less responsible for the first phase of American emancipation than, no doubt, the emancipatory ideas of the fathers of the American state and democracy Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams.

In now classic movies Sergio Leone, as well as some other western films, the railway is often a symbol of the unification of East and West of the country that will bear the name of the United States of America. At the same time, in the films in question, the railway evoked the atmosphere and image of the border, its conquest, the size of that space.

Someone said that the railroad played a major role in movies about that time. In any case, the train expressed a new era in American history, civilization, modernity that slowly archived the periods of the (Wild) West, whose atmosphere, especially its characters, remains unforgettable.

Sergio Leone's film Once Upon a Time in the Wild West begins with three outlaws waiting for a train at a remote station in Arizona, in which is a man playing an accordion (actor Charles Bronson) and with whom those three have some accounts.

In the legendary film "Lawrence of Arabia" (the main role Peter O'Toole) director David Lynn striking scenes of Turkish train diversions by the main character, a British intelligence officer and adventurer, are shown Lawrence along with Arab rebels.

If the railway played a big role in the first stages of American unification, their former colonizers, the English, built an even more spectacular railway line, on another continent - from Cairo to Cape Town, connecting the vast area of ​​the British Empire in Africa.

But the geopolitics of railways is not just a topic of the past. It is still relevant today. In the new economic rapprochement between Russia and China, there is talk of modernizing the transcontinental railway system from the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean, i.e. the St. Petersburg - Shanghai line. There is no need to waste words on the economic and strategic effects of this megaproject.

The current moment of complicated and increasingly risky international relations does not go in the direction of strengthening Eurasian integration, in which the area from Lisbon to Vladivostok, with projects along that line, would sometimes be mentioned, with the help of geopolitical imagination or not.

Montenegro in the game of geopolitics with railway means

The beginning of the action in the following story takes place in the first decade of the 20th century in Cetinje. Railway projects are decided there, all in the context of the then strong rivalry between Austria and Italy on our territory. Apparently, the rivalry of geopolitical goals with railway means.

In our short review, let's start with the news of June 6, 1904. which appears on the first page of "Corierre della sera", the largest Italian newspaper then and now.

The news is entitled "Averted danger" ("Un pericolo evitato", and comes from Montenegro, from Cetinje).

Correspondent of an Italian newspaper Viko Mantegaca, a good connoisseur of opportunities in the Balkans announced the good news for Italy that the official offer of Austria for the construction of the Spič - Bar - Skadar railway was rejected in Cetinje. The author of the article in the Milan newspaper is well documented stating that the Austrian diplomat in Cetinje handed over the official offer to Prince Nikola with the elaborations of the bank and other institutions that would participate in the project.

On that occasion, two more important pieces of information were announced. So that the offered line would soon be connected to Herceg-Novi, from where there were already lines along Dalmatia (as shown by the project in the picture). And the other news, that the Turkish sultan agrees with the project of the line to Shkodër.

Obviously worried by this offer, and representing the interests of Italy, Mantegac in the article laments the dangers to which Montenegro is exposed, precisely "narrowed by railways between two empires, Austria and Turkey".

After the rejection of this project, the reporter was delighted that, despite the difficult economic conditions - as he states - "once again, Montenegro sacrificed and showed its honor".

The message is clear, that the Italians should start building a railway and a port in Montenegro as soon as possible, thereby securing their influence in the Balkans. In the extensive text, which obviously has the dimensions of a geopolitical essay, it is advocated that instead of the Austrian-Turkish railway line through Montenegro, an Italian initiative is needed, a railway project, in the first phase through Montenegro, which would later be part of the line from the Adriatic to the Danube.

"Compania di Antivari" ("Company of Bar") founded in 1905 with its headquarters in Venice, built the Port of Bar in 1909, the Bar - Virpazar railway, organizing traffic navigation on Lake Skadar. Again, and understandably, Shkodër is part of that project, this time with lake lines.

Somewhat earlier highly inspired, rhetorical and visionary ups and downs of the Montenegrin sovereign came true Nikola Petrović in his speeches - "that one day a railway will pass through the dark heart of Sutorman" and "that the largest ships in the world will enter the port of Bar".

The bearers of the entire project were able Italian entrepreneurs, with them also elite persons of the Italian society at that time - scientists, writers, senators, nobles, journalists - such as a Nobel laureate Guljerma Marconi, then Vittorio Rici, Piero Foscari, Bernando Nogara, Roberto Paganini, Carlo Ottavio Cornadja, the already mentioned Vico Mantegaca... All, therefore, in the Venetian "Compania di Antivari".

A little later, a famous poet will join this composition Gabriele D'Annunzio, at one stage also politically engaged for the "Montenegrin cause", after 1918.

Giuseppe Volpi between the railway and film

Volpi is the leading figure, spiritus movens investment venture in Montenegro in the first decade of the 20th century, primarily in the economic and technical sense. Certainly also in the political sense, because the Italian government stood behind this project, apparently a geopolitical breakthrough in the Balkans, which later historians will call Drang nach osten of Giolitian Italy.

Many historical books, textbooks, and encyclopedias testify that Volpi was one of the most prominent figures in Italy in the first half of the 20th century. In one letter, Volpi writes to Gabriel D'Annunci about himself that "he is a faithful, always ready pirate". During his life, Count Volpi was, among other things, a senator, governor of Libya, minister of finance and monetary strategist of the state, chief negotiator at the Versailles Conference as a member of the economic commission, creator of the law on the reform of the lira.... Finally, Volpi is the founder and president of the International Film Festival in Venice in 1933. Before the foundation of the Volpi festival, the faithful son of the aristocratic republic of Venice confided in his friend: "We need to invent something big for the world to come to Venice." I want the world, the world..!” The film festival, without a doubt, brought a great world to Venice, including the elite artistic world. It is still the same today, and the festival award for the role is named "Copa Volpi", after the founder of the festival.

In his writings, Volpi states that in addition to his great achievements in life, he would like to be remembered as constructor, therefore as a builder. What he started at the beginning of his biography was in Montenegro and resulted in the construction of a port and a railway. He then continued with much larger projects in Italy and abroad.

The name of Giuseppe Volpi and the extraordinary creative life of this tireless constructor, from the railway in Montenegro to the end of the International Film Festival in Venice - could, in a certain way, symbolize the title of this review.