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.
About the author
Edith W. Clowes is Professor at the University of Virginia and teaches Russian language, literature, and culture and Czech literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her primary research and teaching interests span the interactions between literature, philosophy, religion, and utopian thought. More recently, she has turned to the question of imagined geography and perceptions of space and place in contemporary Russian culture. Clowes is the author of several books on Russian literature and culture, including The Revolution of Moral Consciousness: Nietzsche in Russian Literature, 1890-1914 (translated into Russian by Akademicheskii Proekt, St. Petersburg, 1999).
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