Russia on the Edge Contributor(s): Clowes, Edith W. (Author) |
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ISBN: 0801477255 ISBN-13: 9780801477256 Publisher: Cornell University Press OUR PRICE: $34.60 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: April 2011 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Russian & Former Soviet Union - History | Russia & The Former Soviet Union - Philosophy | Political |
Dewey: 891.709 |
LCCN: 2010042040 |
Physical Information: 0.5" H x 6.1" W x 9.1" (0.66 lbs) 200 pages |
Themes: - Cultural Region - Russia |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have confronted a major crisis of identity. Soviet ideology rested on a belief in historical progress, but the post-Soviet imagination has obsessed over territory. Indeed, geographical metaphors--whether axes of north vs. south or geopolitical images of center, periphery, and border--have become the signs of a different sense of self and the signposts of a new debate about Russian identity. In Russia on the Edge, Edith W. Clowes argues that refurbished geographical metaphors and imagined geographies provide a useful perspective for examining post-Soviet debates about what it means to be Russian today. Clowes lays out several sides of the debate. She takes as a backdrop the strong criticism of Soviet Moscow and its self-image as uncontested global hub by major contemporary writers, among them Tatyana Tolstaya and Viktor Pelevin. The most vocal, visible, and colorful rightist ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, the founder of neo-Eurasianism, has articulated positions contested by such writers and thinkers as Mikhail Ryklin, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and Anna Politkovskaia, whose works call for a new civility in a genuinely pluralistic Russia. Dugin's extreme views and their many responses--in fiction, film, philosophy, and documentary journalism--form the body of this book. In Russia on the Edge, literary and cultural critics will find the keys to a vital post-Soviet writing culture. For intellectual historians, cultural geographers, and political scientists the book is a guide to the variety of post-Soviet efforts to envision new forms of social life, even as a reconstructed authoritarianism has taken hold. The book introduces nonspecialist readers to some of the most creative and provocative of present-day Russia's writers and public intellectuals. |
Contributor Bio(s): Clowes, Edith W.: - Edith W. Clowes is the Brown-Forman Professor of Arts and Sciences in the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures at the University of Virginia. Her books include Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity, also from Cornell, Doctor Zhivago: A Critical Companion, The Revolution of Moral Consciousness: Nietzsche and Russian Literature, and Russian Experimental Fiction: Resisting Ideology after Utopia. |