“Vas tni” as invented tradition in the poetical imagination of Chuvash modernism and postmodernism

The purpose of this study is to analyze the images of “ҫӑvaš tӗnҫi” or “Chuvash world” in the poetry of Chuvash modernism and postmodernism. The author analyzes “ҫӑvaš tӗnҫi” as a number of different narratives forming the invented tradition of Chuvash identity presented in the literature. The article analyzes the poetic experiments of Şeşpӗl Mişşi, Andrey Petokki, Mitta Vasleyӗ, Peter Husankay, Gennadij Aigi and Iosif Trer. The author analyzes how Şeşpӗl Mişşi imagined and constructed ideal images of the “Chuvash world”. The article also shows the cultural contribution of Andrey Petokki, Mitta Vasleyӗ, Peter Husankay to the development of the “Chuvash world” as one of the “invented traditions” in Chuvash identity. The contribution of these authors is analyzed in contexts of the integration of Chuvash poetry into the official ideological canon. It is assumed that the images of “ҫӑvaš tӗnҫi” or “Chuvash world” in the poetry of Chuvash modernism and postmodernism became its “invented traditions”, inspiring the construction and imagination of identity in the Soviet and post-Soviet cultural situations. The author analyzes attempts to visualize the images of “ҫӑvaš” as invented tradition of the Chuvash literature of the 20th century, suggesting that such cultural practices were equally characteristic of Soviet modernism and contemporary postmodernism. The results of the study suggest that the concept of the “Chuvash world” has become one of the “invented traditions” of the Chuvash identity, including images of the utopian future “Chuvash world”; plant as a source of social changes and transformations stimulating modernization; as well as images of the past, reducing in postmodernism to the concepts of “sun” and “ancestors” as possible reference points for the national and cultural imagination.