M HKA Ensembles

Periodical

Collection: Collection MHKA, Antwerp.

Versty (EN: Milestones) is a literature magazine founded by members of the Eurasianists movement in Paris in 1926. Its title refers to the eponymous collection of poems by renowned Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Having emerged in the Russian émigré circles in Europe in the early 1920s as a cultural and philosophical worldview shaped around criticism of Eurocentrism, Eurasianism became an extensive movement with branches in Berlin, Belgrade, Brussels, and its main centres in Prague and Paris. The movement provided a platform for new approaches and discoveries in the fields of ethnography, historiography, geography, linguistics and theology. Among the extensive number of publications founded by Eurasianists, Versty was conceived as a strictly culture-orientated one. Opening with Tsvetaeva’s drama Theseus (1924), the second volume of Versty also includes essays on cultural history and philosophy by such prominent émigré scholars as Nikolai Trubetskoy, Lev Shestov, Lev Karsavin and Vasily Sesemann among others. The third and last volume of Versty was published in 1928. A schism in the movement, as well as the shift towards the creation of a socio-political doctrine, brought the publication to an end.