Narrating Captivity—Narrating Oneself: The Report of Filipp Efremov About His Coerced Mobility in Central Asia (1774–1782)

This article analyses representations of captivity in the first published account of forced mobility in Central Asia, Filipp Efremov’s account ‘The Nine Years’ Wandering’ (1784), which tells of his forced stay in Bukhara and his journey via South-Asian countries to St. Petersburg (1774–1782). By focussing on the text’s different editions and by comparing the representations of captivity in these different versions, this article will focus on the following aspects: What representations of captivity in terms of self-identification and asymmetrical social relations are contained in these texts? How did the agendas behind the processes of text production and publication affect the structure and content of the narratives? In this way, this article contributes to the study of narrative contextualisation, patterns of self-representation, narrative agency and their modification within particular genres over the course of the publication history in order to identify new aspects of narrated dependency as a rarely considered aspect of life writing.