Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity - Couverture souple

Clowes, Edith W.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0801477255 ISBN 13 : 9780801477256

Editeur : Cornell University Press, 2011

Synopsis

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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

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.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Cornell University Press
• Date d'édition: 2011
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0801477255
• ISBN 13: 9780801477256
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 200
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible