Overview

On the Threshold of Eurasia explores the idea of the Russian and Soviet ""East"" as a political, aesthetic, and scientific system of ideas that emerged through a series of intertextual encounters produced by Russians and Turkic Muslims on the imperial periphery amidst the revolutionary transition from 1905 to 1929. Identifying the role of Russian and Soviet Orientalism in shaping the formation of a specifically Eurasian imaginary, Leah Feldman examines connections between avant-garde literary works; Orientalist historical, geographic and linguistic texts; and political essays written by Russian and Azeri Turkic Muslim writers and thinkers. Tracing these engagements and interactions between Russia and the Caucasus, Feldman offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity, and anti-imperialism from the vantage point not of the metropole but from the cosmopolitan centers at the edges of the Russian and later Soviet empires. In this way, On the Threshold of Eurasia illustrates the pivotal impact that the Caucasus (and the Soviet periphery more broadly) had-through the founding of an avant-garde poetics animated by Russian and Arabo-Persian precursors, Islamic metaphysics, and Marxist-Leninist theories of language -on the monumental aesthetic and political shifts of the early twentieth century.

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9781501726507

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Reviews

On the Threshold of Eurasia presents new ways of thinking about Russian literature, Russian modernism and the avant-garde, and the long revolutionary period, and expands our view of what the Caucasus region is and was. --Katya Hokanson, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Russian, University of Oregon, and author of Writing at Russia's Border On the Threshold of Eurasia joins with some of the best new work being done on the culture, history, and social geography of the Caucasus. In this beautiful work, Feldman offers a portrait of a robust world area that has long been lost to other master narratives of history, place, and culture. --Bruce Grant, Professor of Anthropology, New York University, and author of In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas and The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus

Author Information

Leah Feldman is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago.

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