On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus
Leah Feldman
Abstract
On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus explores the idea of the Russian and Soviet “East” as a political, aesthetic and scientific system of ideas that contributed to the construction of Soviet discourses of ethnicity, empire, and literary modernity during the tumultuous first two decades of the twentieth century, from 1905 to 1929. It exposes connections between literary works, political essays, and orientalist history, geography, and ethnology written by Russian and Azeri Turkic Muslim writers and thinkers, many of whom have been unknown to Anglophone readers unti ... More
On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus explores the idea of the Russian and Soviet “East” as a political, aesthetic and scientific system of ideas that contributed to the construction of Soviet discourses of ethnicity, empire, and literary modernity during the tumultuous first two decades of the twentieth century, from 1905 to 1929. It exposes connections between literary works, political essays, and orientalist history, geography, and ethnology written by Russian and Azeri Turkic Muslim writers and thinkers, many of whom have been unknown to Anglophone readers until now. Tracing translations and intertextual engagements across Russia, the Caucasus and western Europe, this book offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity and anti-imperialism from the vantage point of cosmopolitan centers in the Russian empire and Soviet Union. In this way, On the Threshold of Eurasia illustrates the pivotal impact of the literature of the Caucasus and the former Soviet periphery more broadly on the monumental aesthetic and political shifts of the early twentieth century.
Keywords:
Eurasianism,
Anti-imperialism,
Orientalism,
Geopolitics,
Global Avant-gardes/Modernisms
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781501726507 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: May 2019 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501726507.001.0001 |
