Russia on the Edge

Clowes, Edith W.

doi:10.7591/cornell/9780801448560.001.0001

Cited by 32 publications

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“…Post-Soviet Russia provides a similar situation of dissolution and loss of faith in progress, and recent scholarly literature has emphasised the productivity of spatial imagination in post-Soviet identity discourses (Clowes 2011), suffice it to mention the current ubiquity of notions such as "Eurasia," "The Russian World," or "Russian Civilisation." As this article has shown, however, space is not new to Russian identity formation, but has been central to previous moments of both rupture and increasing stability.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nikolai Berdiaev and the “boundless spaces” of Russia

Mjør

2017

Nordlit

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The article analyses the ways in which the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev understood Russian space and geography, beginning with the texts that he wrote during the First World War and ending with his book The Russian Idea (1946) The claim that some kind of correspondence exists between a specific Russian mentality (or the "Russian soul") and the vast and wide-open Russian landscape, has been described as "one of the most popular Russian autostereotypes" (Møller 1999, 11). One of the most prominent proponents of this stereotype in the first half of the Twentieth Century was the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev . Berdiaev would return to this connection time and time again in his writings on Russia and Russian thought.Berdiaev published his first book in 1901. In time Russia itself would become a central topic in his philosophical writings. Berdiaev's interest in Russia peaked for the first time during the First World War. Simultaneously with the writing of what is considered his major philosophical work, The Meaning of Creativity (1916), Berdiaev began to produce a vast output of smaller pieces on Russia. It was the war itself that prompted Berdiaev to reflect upon Russia, but his pieces were concerned not so much with the ongoing war as with Russia's history, culture and people, which he often approached from a religious, messianic-prophetic perspective. Before the war he had disseminated his views on Russia and its meaning from time to time, for instance in The Philosophy of Freedom (1911) or in his 1912 monograph on the Slavophile Aleksei Khomiakov, in which he suggested that a messianic self-awareness was something distinctively Russian. However, it was during the war that "this messianism reached its most optimistic and triumphalist peak" (Siljak 2016, 749).

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nikolai Berdiaev and the “boundless spaces” of Russia

Mjør

2017

Nordlit

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“…As Edith Clowes notes, "clearly Bodrov is operating within the Eursasianist subtext that the Mongol empire became the template for later Russian empires." 42 Bodrov himself in an interview claimed that Genghis Khan was in fact a civilizing force in the world, eliminating torture and slavery in the lands he occupied.…”

Section: Body Politics and The Asian Turnmentioning

confidence: 99%

Go East, Young Man! Body Politics and the Asian Turn in Putin‐Era Cinema

Baer

2015

The Russian Review

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The deployment of the East as a discursive means to distinguish Russia from the West has been popular among Russians and foreigners alike for centuries, and it remains highly relevant in today's Russia. While many Western observers and a good number of Russian writers and thinkers have seen this association with the East in negative terms, invoking images of autocracy, violence and under‐development, other Russians have viewed Russia's connection to the East in a positive light, focusing on its traditions of spirituality and communalism and opposing them to “Western” values of individualism and materialism. This article analyzes the Asian martial artist as a corporeal metaphor in Putin‐era Russia, focusing on the role it plays not only in the self‐fashioning of the Russian male but also in the recent reevaluation of Russia's imperial past, and future. The article draws a connection between this cultural reevaluation of the East and Eurasianist revisionist interpretations of Russia's Mongol past and, specifically, the legacy of Genghis Khan. The conclusions demonstrate that Eurasianist theories, largely discarded by Western scholars, are not confined to the upper echelons of the Putin administration but in fact permeate Putin‐era culture.

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Introduction: national subjects

Bassin¹,

Kelly²

2012

Soviet and Post-Soviet Identities

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Russia on the Edge

Cited by 32 publications

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Nikolai Berdiaev and the “boundless spaces” of Russia

Nikolai Berdiaev and the “boundless spaces” of Russia

Go East, Young Man! Body Politics and the Asian Turn in Putin‐Era Cinema

Introduction: national subjects

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