Exile, World Literature, and Anthropology: A Reading of Three Swedish Narratives from Siberia

Summary This article explores world‐making literary work through a reading of Siberian exile narratives from the early twentieth century. I focus on three books written in Swedish. This choice of texts helps illustrate that Siberian exile writing makes up a heterogeneous corpus that does not fit neatly within national or linguistic boundaries. Thus I approach narratives of Siberian exile, not as a subgenre of Russian literature, but as parts of an extensive world literature on travel and exile. Myths and stories on exile often tell us that a banished person cannot continue to exist in the same way as before, but must re‐create her sense of self and fashion a new world around her. I take this quality of exile seriously: that it invites, or even compels, particular kinds of intellectual thought. To translate such experiences into text demands literary work, and I pay particular attention to modes of writing developed in response to circumstances that at first appeared ineffable. This is also where world literature and anthropology meet: in a shared interest for how worlds appear, how they could be rendered visible, and—most importantly—what we might learn from comparing different such forms of world‐making.