Abstract
In post-Soviet Russia, neo-Eurasianist ideologies have played a prominent role, and for more than two decades, discussions of geopolitical integration in Eurasia have dominated scholarship in disciplines such as history and political science.1 Eurasianist discourse has affected not only the political landscape but also literature and culture. The concept of Eurasia plays a central role in many literary texts of the 1990s and early 2000s, from pulp fiction to popular intellectual prose, demonstrating how various iterations of the Eurasianist political discourse have captured public imagination more broadly. Despite the growing presence of Eurasian themes in contemporary fiction, however, scholars have only recently begun to examine Eurasianism as a literary and cultural phenomenon.2
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Notes
For contemporary scholarship on Eurasianism in the early 1990s, see Mark Bassin, ‘Russia between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographical Space’, Slavic Review, Vol. 50, No. 5, 1991, pp. 1–17;
David Kerr, ‘The New Eurasianism: The Rise of Geopolitics in Russia’s Foreign Policy’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 47, No. 6, 1995, pp. 977–988;
Madhavan K. Palat, ‘Eurasianism as an Ideology for Russia’s Future’, Economic and Political Weekly, Special Number, 28:51, 18 December 1993, pp. 2799–2809;
Dmitrii Shlapentokh, ‘Eurasianism: Past and Present’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2, 1997, pp. 129–151. The 2000s saw a wave of scholarship on Eurasianism by the authors above, comprehensive and analytical studies by scholars Peter S. Duncan, Sergei Glebov and Marlene Laruelle, and a variety of insightful articles by Matthew Schmidt, Aleksandr Titov, A. P. Tsygankov and Andreas Umland, among others.
Among the scholarship on Eurasianism in literature before the 1990s, Harsha Ram’s essays about Eurasia in the work of poet Velimir Khlebnikov, and poet and scholar Olzhas Suleimenov, stands out. Harsha Ram, ‘Imagining Eurasia: The Poetics and Ideology of Olzhas Suleimenov’s AZ i IA’, Slavic Review, Vol. 60, No. 2, 2001, pp. 289–311;
Harsha Ram, ‘The Poetics of Eurasia: Velimir Khlebnikov between Empire and Revolution’, in Madhavan Palat (ed.), Social Identities in Revolutionary Russia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan pp. 209–231, 2001). Literary scholarship on Eurasianism in post-Soviet literature is relatively scant but the following works stand out for their insight into the connections between literature and ideology.
See Marina Aptekman, ‘Forward to the Past, or Two Radical views on the Russian nationalist future: Pyotr Krasnov’s Behind the Thistle and Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of an Oprichnik’, Slavic and Eastern European Journal, Vol. 53, No. 2, 2009, pp. 241–260;
Edith Clowes, Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and PostSoviet Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011);
Boris Noordenbos, ‘Ironic Imperialism: How Russian Patriots are Reclaiming Postmodernism’, Studies in East European Thought, Vol. 63, No. 2, 2011, pp. 147–158.
See Nikolai Trubetskoi’s brochure Europe and Mankind, which served as an impetus to Eurasianist dialogue, and Petr Savitskii’s response essay, ‘Europe and Eurasia’. Nikolai Trubetskoi, Evropa i chelovechestvo (Sofia: Rossiisko-bolgarskoekn-vo, 1920);
Petr Savitskii, ‘Evropa i Evraziia’, in Kontinent Evraziia (Moscow: Agraf, 1997), pp. 141–160.
According to Dugin, ‘at the core of the geo-political construction of this Empire should be the principle of a “common enemy.” The repudiation of Atlanticism, the rejection of the US’s strategic control, and of the primacy of economic, liberal market values — these provide the common basis of civilization, that shared impulse that will pave the way for a durable political and strategic union and will create the backbone of the coming Empire.’ Aleksandr Dugin, Osnovy geopolitiki: geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii (Moscow: Arktogeia, 1997).
Lev Gumilev (1912–1992) was a Russian historian and geographer. His theories, though largely proved as unscientific, have enjoyed great popularity in Russia since the 1990s. Even though he wrote many of his works in the 1980s, most of them were not published until after the fall of the Soviet Union. He developed the ‘passionarity theory of ethnogenesis’ (passionarnaia teoria etno-geneza) in his monograph Etnogenez i biosfera Zemli. This describes history as the interaction of various ethnoses with each other and with the geographical environments in which they develop. According to Gumilev, an ethnos starts its development with an impulse of passionarity (passionarnyj tolchok). He defines passionarity as the human capacity of heightened absorption of biochemical energy from the environment, and the ability to transform this energy into creative activity. Lev Gumilev, Etnogenez i biosfera zemli (Moscow: TOO Mishel’ i ko, 1993).
Tolz argued that three major revisionist views of Russian statehood had formed in post-Soviet Russia. Two of the views she identified bore imperialist undertones with Eurasianist inclinations. See Vera Tolz, ‘Conflicting “Homeland Myths” and Nation-State Building in Postcommunist Russia’, Slavic Review, Vol. 57, No. 2, 1998, pp. 267–294.
Eurasianist motifs and references appear, to a greater or lesser extent, in novels by Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Pelevin, Aleksandr Prokhanov and Dmitrii Bykov, among others. See, for example, Vladimir Sorokin’s Goluboie salo (Blue Lard, 1999), Den’ Oprichnika (Day of the Oprichnik, 2006), Sakharnyi kreml’ (Sugar Kremlin, 2008), Metel’ (The Blizzard, 2010);
Viktor Pelevin’s Sviashchennaia kniga oborotnia (The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, 2004), Chapaev i pustota (Chapaev and Void, 1996, published in English as Buddha’s Little Finger and The Clay Machine-Gun);
Aleksandr Prokhanov’s Gospodin Geksogen (Mr. Hexogen, 2002);
and Dmitrii Bykov’s Opravdanie (Justification, 2005).
See N. Ia. Danilevskii, Rossiia i Evropa (Moscow: Kniga, 1991); Trubetskoi, Evropa i chelovechestvo.
See Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (Wien und Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1918);
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); Aleksandr Dugin, Osnovy geopolitiki.
Khol’m Van Zaichik, Delo zhadnogo varvara (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2003).
Petr Savitskii, ‘Evraziistvo (opyt sistematicheskogo izlozheniia.)’ in Kontinent Evraziia (Moscow: Agraf pp. 295–303, 1997).
Aleksandr Dugin, ‘O evraziistve’ in Petr Savitskii, Kontinent Evraziia (Moscow: Agraf, 1997) p. 12.
Khol’m Van Zaichik, Delo lis-oborotnei, (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2001) p. 5
Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 55.
Trubetskoi wrote that the religious sensibility of the Chinese was ‘utterly alien’ to Russian-Eurasian culture. See Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Legacy of Genghis Khan and Other Essays on Russia’s Identity (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1991), p. 131.
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Filimonova, T. (2015). Eurasia as Discursive Literary Space at the Millennium. In: Lane, D., Samokhvalov, V. (eds) The Eurasian Project and Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472960_8
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