Russia on the Edge

Through real and imagined geographies, examining post-Soviet debates about what it means to be Russian today.

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 previous books include Fiction's Overcoat: Russian Literary Culture and the Question of Philosophy, 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.

In Russia on the Edge, Edith Clowes investigates how and why borders are so central in today's Russia. She brilliantly demonstrates that much of Russian identity is defined not by what Russia is but rather where Russia is. Indeed peripheries function imaginatively as the sites of vital debates about how Russians see themselves. Clowes therefore offers a must-read analysis of how geographical and geopolitical metaphors construct post-Soviet Russian identity.

Clowes provides a provocative reassessment of the new Russia, positing a shift from a traditional temporal historical paradigm to a spatial one. With the fall of the multinational Soviet empire where power resided in Moscow, a more diffuse situation has developed with the rise of ethnic and national identities on the geographical perimeters. Geography has partially displaced history, to the great discomfort of the central ethnic Russian populace.... In this stimulating study, Clowes discusses liberal commentators Mikhail Ryklin and Anna Politkovskaia versus Aleksandr Dugin, an ultra-nationalist... and the more diverse attitudes of 'peripheralist' writers such as Victor Pelevin and Ludmilla Ulitskaia.

Mark Bassin, Södertörn University:

Russia on the Edge is an exceptionally innovative and insightful contribution to the literature on nationalism, national self-images, and identity in Russia today. Arguing that conceptions of 'what Russia is' depend critically on notions about where the country is located, Edith W. Clowes makes a compelling case for the new importance of 'imagined geographies' as perceptual arenas for the construction and contestation of identity in Post-Soviet Russia.