{"product_id":"russia-on-the-edge-1","title":"Russia on the Edge","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eSince the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have confronted a major crisis of identity. \u003c\/b\u003eSoviet 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eClowes 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n","brand":"Edith W. Clowes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53615389770108,"sku":"9780801477256","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0251\/4980\/0541\/files\/9780801477256_05d58029-5a44-4620-989d-cf30f8409840.jpg?v=1725623300","url":"https:\/\/combined-academic.myshopify.com\/products\/russia-on-the-edge-1","provider":"Combined Academic Publishers - Mare Nostrum Group","version":"1.0","type":"link"}