When Literary Space Parts Ways with Physical Geography: Substitutions by Aksyonov and Morchiladze for the Missing Islands of the Black Sea

Among the most important factors that differentiate the fortunes of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean comes the role the islands played in history as nodes of connectivity between the networks of islands. Within the Mediterranean context, they connected islands with the landmasses, as well as lands surrounding it with one another. There are two sets of Mediterranean islands, one consisting of the larger and better connected ones such as Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus, and the other, of archipelagos, of which the Aegean is the paradigmatic example. By contrast, their conspicuous absence in the Black Sea became a formidable obstacle in an already notoriously inhospitable sea. Put differently, the Black Sea is a Mediterranean minus the islands that made almost all the difference. The Black Sea has only very few and singular islands, like the Snake (Zmiinyi) Island, and the fewer of them are inhabited by only a very small number of people. In any case, the few islands of the Black Sea disappear from sight in maps because of the scale effect, as they are quite small by geographical conventions. There remains thus no puzzle to intrigue our minds, and physical geography can count them out. Be that as it may, small islands can be notoriously maverick, and force themselves on sight from time to time, as has been the case with the Serpent Island off the Danube delta during the current Russia-Ukraine war. When islands become a bone of contention for Great Powers, their visibility increases unexpectedly