- 276 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
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) hadâthrough the founding of an avant-garde poetics animated by Russian and Arabo-Persian precursors, Islamic metaphysics, and Marxist-Leninist theories of language âon the monumental aesthetic and political shifts of the early twentieth century.
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Table of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Transliteration
- Introduction: Heterodoxy and Heterology on the Threshold of Eurasia
- Part I. Heterodoxy and Imperial Returns
- Part II. Heterology and Utopian Futures
- Postscript: Latinization and Refiliâs âThe Windowâ onto Soviet Azerbaijan
- Notes
- References
- Index