Search results for ""Author Mark Bassin""

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the legacy of the historian, ethnographer, and geographer Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912–1992) has attracted extraordinary interest in Russia and beyond. The son of two of modern Russia’s greatest poets, Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev spent thirteen years in Stalinist prison camps, and after his release in 1956 remained officially outcast and professionally shunned. Out of the tumult of perestroika, however, his writings began to attract attention and he himself became a well-known and popular figure. Despite his highly controversial (and often contradictory) views about the meaning of Russian history, the nature of ethnicity, and the dynamics of interethnic relations, Gumilev now enjoys a degree of admiration and adulation matched by few if any other public intellectual figures in the former Soviet Union. He is freely compared to Albert Einstein and Karl Marx, and his works today sell millions of copies and have been adopted as official textbooks in Russian high schools. Universities and mountain peaks alike are named in his honor, and a statue of him adorns a prominent thoroughfare in a major city. Leading politicians, President Vladimir Putin very much included, are unstinting in their deep appreciation for his legacy, and one of the most important foreign-policy projects of the Russian government today is clearly inspired by his particular vision of how the Eurasian peoples formed a historical community. In The Gumilev Mystique, Mark Bassin presents an analysis of this remarkable phenomenon. He investigates the complex structure of Gumilev’s theories, revealing how they reflected and helped shape a variety of academic as well as political and social discourses in the USSR, and he traces how his authority has grown yet greater across the former Soviet Union. The themes he highlights while untangling Gumilev’s complicated web of influence are critical to understanding the political, intellectual, and ethno-national dynamics of Russian society from the age of Stalin to the present day.

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Exploring the creation, transformation, and imagination of Russian space as a lens through which to understand Russia's development over the centuries, this volume makes an important contribution to Russian studies and the "new spatial history." It considers aspects of the relationship between place and power in Russia from the local level to the national and from the eighteenth century through the present. Essays include: Melissa K. Stockdale, "What is a Fatherland? Changing Notions of Duty, Rights and Belonging in Russia"; Mark Bassin, "Nationhood, Natural Regions, Mestorazvitie: Environmental Discourses in Classic Eurasianism"; John Randolph, "Russian Route: The Politics of the Petersburg-Moscow Road, 1700-1800"; Richard Stites, "On the Dance Floor: Royal Power, Class, and Nationality in Servile Russia"; Patricia Herlihy, "Ab Oriente ad Ultimum Oriente: Eugen Scuyler, Russia and Central Asia"; Robert Argenbright, "Soviet Agitational Vehicles: Colonization from Place to Place"; Christopher Ely, "Street Space and Political Culture under Alexander II"; Sergei Zhuk, "Unmaking the Sacred Landscape of Orthodox Russia: Religious Pluralism, Identity Crisis, and Religious Politics on the Ukrainian Borderlands of the late Russian Empire"; Cathy A. Frierson, "Filling in the Map for Vologda's Post-Soviet Identity"; and Lisa A, "Kirschenbaum, Place, Memory and the Politics of Identity: Historical Buildings and Street Names in Leningrad-St. Petersburg."

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Exploring the creation, transformation, and imagination of Russian space as a lens through which to understand Russia's development over the centuries, this volume makes an important contribution to Russian studies and the "new spatial history." It considers aspects of the relationship between place and power in Russia from the local level to the national and from the eighteenth century through the present. Essays include: Melissa K. Stockdale, "What is a Fatherland? Changing Notions of Duty, Rights and Belonging in Russia"; Mark Bassin, "Nationhood, Natural Regions, Mestorazvitie: Environmental Discourses in Classic Eurasianism"; John Randolph, "Russian Route: The Politics of the Petersburg-Moscow Road, 1700-1800"; Richard Stites, "On the Dance Floor: Royal Power, Class, and Nationality in Servile Russia"; Patricia Herlihy, "Ab Oriente ad Ultimum Oriente: Eugen Scuyler, Russia and Central Asia"; Robert Argenbright, "Soviet Agitational Vehicles: Colonization from Place to Place"; Christopher Ely, "Street Space and Political Culture under Alexander II"; Sergei Zhuk, "Unmaking the Sacred Landscape of Orthodox Russia: Religious Pluralism, Identity Crisis, and Religious Politics on the Ukrainian Borderlands of the late Russian Empire"; Cathy A. Frierson, "Filling in the Map for Vologda's Post-Soviet Identity"; and Lisa A, "Kirschenbaum, Place, Memory and the Politics of Identity: Historical Buildings and Street Names in Leningrad-St. Petersburg."

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