In recent decades, “sea studies” have become an important addition to area and regional studies. Seas and oceans as spaces for trade and networking have grabbed the attention of humanists and social scientists alike. Among seas, the almost-landlocked Black Sea region has become an object of interest, with its widely divergent cultural and linguistic spaces, burdened with a history of imperial conquest and control (Gheorghe I. Brătianu, La Mer Noire. Des origines à la conquête ottoman [2009]; Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II [1995]; Cyprian Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World (2013); Neal Ascherson, Black Sea [1995]; Charles King, The Black Sea: A History [2005]; Stella Ghervas, “The Black Sea,” in D. Armitage, A. Bashford, and S. Sivasundaram, eds., Oceanic Histories [2017]). Is the Black Sea an “Ottoman lake,” an imperial backwater, or is it a community of productive interaction? In the 1990s the Turkish economic historian Eyüp Özveren challenged researchers to define the Black Sea as a unit (“A Framework for the Study of the Black Sea World, 1789–1915,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 20:1 (1997): 77–113). In the English-speaking world, with her website “Black Sea Networks,” medievalist Valentina Izmirlieva and her teams have investigated the potential for exchanges of all kinds on the Black Sea (Izmirlieva et al., http://blackseanetworks.org/).

Until very recently, the Black Sea has been the object of economic, historical, and security research. This is the case even though it was writers who reimagined the sea as more than a backwater. In 1996 Liudmila Ulitskaia became among the first in the post-Soviet time to rethink the Black Sea area (and specifically Crimea) as an “oikoumenē” or the civilized “known world.” In Medea and Her Children, the pre-revolutionary Crimean coast is pictured as a relatively happy and functional multicultural community. Before 2018, no one had undertaken a concerted effort to define the “Black Sea world” through the lens of coastal writing cultures. These cultures have been further marginalized as erstwhile colonies of two modern empires—the Ottoman and various iterations of Russian empire. Currently there are several exciting new developments from within the region.

In 2014 Iordan Ljuckanov at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences published a seminal article, “Toward Paired Histories of Small Literatures to Make Them Communicate,” Studii Slavistiki, vol. 11 (2014), 285–300. The article proposes an “interliterary community” studying the Black Sea littoral as a multicultural space of “small literatures”—here, Bulgarian and Georgian—that typically interact only with the dominant Russian literary culture or “western” literary models. The stakes are high: through studying adjacent but “unacquainted” small literatures in and between themselves we might script a way beyond the marginalizing impact of imperial power.

So far, the La Mer Noire project offers two compendia featuring working papers mainly by literary researchers from countries on the Black Sea littoral. Both volumes (2019 and 2023, respectively) aim to establish the idea of a “Black Sea literature” and are part of an exciting regional cooperative effort to establish Black Sea area studies, oriented toward the humanities. Working papers in both volumes appear in French, English, and a few in Georgian. Abstracts are in French or English.

The first volume of La Mer Noire (2019) features papers from the 2018 conference on the Black Sea as a literary and cultural space, held at Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia. The editors, all in literary studies, present their project as a new departure in comparative literature, the “vocation” of which is “to liberate itself from the divisions which are based on national qualities” (11) and to forge a “transnational perspective” (11). This new Black-Sea-Studies group is a “research network which aims to explore the possibilities of the synchronic and diachronic study of the Black Sea literary and cultural space” (11). Specifically, the group is interested in three research issues: the relevance of the Black Sea as literary space in forming national and cultural identities; the depiction of the Black Sea in religious, mythological, and historiographical texts; and the relevance of the Black Sea in literary discourse about the imperial heritage. Most articles indeed address a literary work or works of one coastal literature and the imperial heritage (Tsipuria, Ljuckanov, Beridze), or literary inheritance from Greek and Latin antiquity (Eiben, Abakelia). Four articles reach further and genuinely bridge national boundaries, mainly but not only exploring literary interactions between Georgian and Turkish writing cultures (Õzveren, Ruhi, Çiloğlu, Chilashvili). The 2022 volume is more ambitious than the first and is the first book published in Ljuckanov’s publishing enterprise, Transpontica. This enormous compendium aims at a broader investigation of the imagined Black Sea in the writing cultures of current coastal countries and some other communities and former coastal communities. Papers treat travelogues, historiography, and poetry.

Black Sea trade routes have often been opened by non-native peoples—whether Greeks, Romans, or Persians in antiquity, Scandinavians in the ninth-tenth centuries, and Venetians in the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries. The literary evidence by coastal peoples traditionally shows the Black Sea as a “border” or “edge,” a force of chaos and danger. Many of these peoples tended to be “mountain people” or at least land-oriented people, living either in the Balkans or the Caucasus (Doncu, Ljuckanov). Political repression also plays a part in turning Black Sea residents away from their beautiful sea. Some papers analyze native literary characters who are discouraged from exploring and “living” the Black Sea by more powerful neighbors (Dokhtourichvili).

There are some gaps in both volumes. The main literary players in these papers are Georgian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian, and Turkish. Three papers deal with Armenian evidence of interaction with the Black Sea environment (Dédéyan, Kost´alová, Donabédian). There is virtually no presence of Ukrainian writers’ “marine discourse” (224) oriented toward the Black Sea or interaction with other Black Sea writing communities. And there is no mention of modern Greek, Crimean Tatar, Abkhaz, or Jewish writing about the Black Sea. One picky comment about both volumes: as valuable as this documentation is, most papers are under-edited. The English can sometimes be convoluted, ungrammatical, and hard to understand.

This research makes a groundbreaking contribution to two traditionally difficult interdisciplinary projects—comparative literature and area/regional studies, both of which have suffered since the end of the Cold War. The richness of coastal literatures and art interacting with the idea of the Black Sea has now been established. These volumes launch a crucial interrogation of traditional binaries of center and periphery that marginalize Black Sea communities. As Ljuckanov puts it, the Black Sea coast is a “cosmos” and “neither a backyard nor the better part of the universe” (xlv). It is not that simple borderline, that periphery, between “Hellenes” and “barbarians,” “Europe” and “Asia.” There is a wealth of talented literary production and interesting communities of coastal writers to be explored. These two volumes give a welcome start for further research.