Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet - download pdf or read online

because the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have faced an enormous problem of id. Soviet ideology rested on a trust in old growth, however the post-Soviet mind's eye has obsessed over territory. certainly, geographical metaphors—whether axes of north vs. south or geopolitical photos of middle, outer edge, and border—have turn into the symptoms of a special feel of self and the signposts of a brand new debate approximately Russian id. In Russia at the facet Edith W. Clowes argues that refurbished geographical metaphors and imagined geographies offer an invaluable viewpoint for reading post-Soviet debates approximately what it capability to be Russian today.Clowes lays out a number of aspects of the controversy. She takes as a backdrop the powerful feedback of Soviet Moscow and its self-image as uncontested worldwide hub via significant modern writers, between them Tatyana Tolstaya and Viktor Pelevin. the main vocal, noticeable, and colourful rightist ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, the founding father of neo-Eurasianism, has articulated positions contested by means of such writers and thinkers as Mikhail Ryklin, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and Anna Politkovskaia, whose works demand a brand new civility in a surely pluralistic Russia. Dugin’s severe perspectives and their many responses—in fiction, movie, philosophy, and documentary journalism—form the physique of this book.In Russia at the area literary and cultural critics will locate the keys to an essential post-Soviet writing tradition. For highbrow historians, cultural geographers, and political scientists the booklet is a advisor to the range of post-Soviet efforts to check new kinds of social existence, whilst a reconstructed authoritarianism has taken carry. The booklet introduces nonspecialist readers to a couple of the main artistic and provocative of present-day Russia’s writers and public intellectuals.