Foundations of Russian Culture

Foundations of Russian Culture

Author: Alexander Schmemann

Publisher: Holy Trinity Publications

Published: 2023-10-02

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1942699549

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A culture that demands only freedom from politics, while rejecting and shunning politics itself, remains inadequate, lifeless, and is ultimately doomed. In its turn, politics that rejects the spiritual oversight of culture inevitably degenerates into tyranny or anarchy, into corruption and mediocrity. Inside this deceptively modest volume will be found a remarkably prescient collection of broadcasts, that are perhaps even more pertinent to the contemporary culture and politics of Russia than they were to the audience within the Soviet Union to whom they were originally addressed. Schmemann presents the complex history of Russia and analyzes trends and tendencies within its culture concisely and simply: showing them to be frequently contradictory and even mutually exclusive. He clarifies the multilayered meaning of "foundations"— its underlying building blocks, the spiritual, the political, the historical, as well as the cultural assets in literature, art, science, and philosophy. In these elements he shows what Russia is grappling with in its struggle to find a synthesis that draws both from its own unique elements and its historical and ongoing interconnectedness with the "West" and the "East."


Foundations of Geopolitics: the Geopolitical Future of Russia

Foundations of Geopolitics: the Geopolitical Future of Russia

Author: Alexander Dugin

Publisher:

Published: 2017-08

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 9781521994269

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

ENGLISH TRANSLATION The book is a Russian textbook on geopolitics. It systematically and detailed the basics of geopolitics as a science, its theory, history. Covering a wide range of geopolitical schools and beliefs and actual problems. The first time a Russian geopolitical doctrine. An indispensable guide for all those who make decisions in the most important spheres of Russian political life - for politicians, entrepreneurs, economists, bankers, diplomats, analysts, political scientists, and so on. D.


Mother Russia

Mother Russia

Author: Joanna Hubbs

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 1993-09-22

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9780253115782

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Joanna Hubbs has found the trace of Baba Yaga and the rusalki and Moist Mother Earth and other fascinating feminine myths in Russian culture, and has added richly to the growing interest in popular culture." -- New York Times Book Review "... brave... fascinating... immensely enjoyable... " -- Times Higher Education Supplement "... a stimulating and original study... vivid and readable." -- Russian Review "An immensely stimulating, beautifully written work of scholarship." -- Francine du Plessix Gray "Joanna Hubbs has provided scholars... with a wealth of significant interpretive material to inform if not reform views of both Russian and women's cultures." -- Journal of American Folklore A ground-breaking interpretation of Russian culture from prehistory to the present, dealing with the feminine myth as a central cultural force.


Strategiya

Strategiya

Author: Ofer Fridman

Publisher: Hurst Publishers

Published: 2021-09-30

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1787387313

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In recent years, Western experts have generally portrayed the Kremlin’s actions as either strategic or tactical. Yet this proposition raises a very important question: how closely does the West’s interpretation of Russian strategy reflect the country’s own definitions? While many military historians have sought to interpret Russian strategy, Strategiya takes a different approach. It brings together, in English, the classic works of the Russian art of strategy, which were rediscovered after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead of explaining his analysis of Russia’s contemporary strategy, Ofer Fridman offers his translation of and commentary upon the founding texts of Russia’s own Clausewitzes, Baron Jominis and Liddell Harts, who have been inspiring Russian strategic thinking—both its conceptualisation and its implementation—from the moment Moscow rejected the exclusive role of Marxism-Leninism in strategic affairs. Russian contemporary strategists draw their inspiration from three main schools of thought. While works by Soviet military thinkers have already been translated into English, those by both Imperial strategists and military thinkers in exile have remained almost inaccessible to the Western reader. Filling this lacuna, Strategiya offers a fascinating glimpse inside the foundations of Russian strategic thought and practice.


Russian Eurasianism

Russian Eurasianism

Author: Marlène Laruelle

Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press

Published: 2008-10

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has been marginalized at the edge of a Western-dominated political and economic system. In recent years, however, leading Russian figures, including former president Vladimir Putin, have begun to stress a geopolitics that puts Russia at the center of a number of axes: European-Asian, Christian-Muslim-Buddhist, Mediterranean-Indian, Slavic-Turkic, and so on. This volume examines the political presuppositions and expanding intellectual impact of Eurasianism, a movement promoting an ideology of Russian-Asian greatness, which has begun to take hold throughout Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. Eurasianism purports to tell Russians what is unalterably important about them and why it can only be expressed in an empire. Using a wide range of sources, Marlène Laruelle discusses the impact of the ideology of Eurasianism on geopolitics, interior policy, foreign policy, and culturalist philosophy.


Russian "Hybrid Warfare"

Russian

Author: Ofer Fridman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-08-01

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 0190934735

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

During the last decade, 'Hybrid Warfare' has become a novel yet controversial term in academic, political and professional military lexicons, intended to suggest some sort of mix between different military and non-military means and methods of confrontation. Enthusiastic discussion of the notion has been undermined by conceptual vagueness and political manipulation, particularly since the onset of the Ukrainian Crisis in early 2014, as ideas about Hybrid Warfare engulf Russia and the West, especially in the media. Western defense and political specialists analyzing Russian responses to the crisis have been quick to confirm that Hybrid Warfare is the Kremlin's main strategy in the twenty-first century. But many respected Russian strategists and political observers contend that it is the West that has been waging Hybrid War, Gibridnaya Voyna, since the end of the Cold War. In this highly topical book, Ofer Fridman offers a clear delineation of the conceptual debates about Hybrid Warfare. What leads Russian experts to say that the West is conducting a Gibridnaya Voyna against Russia, and what do they mean by it? Why do Western observers claim that the Kremlin engages in Hybrid Warfare? And, beyond terminology, is this something genuinely new?


The Keys to Happiness

The Keys to Happiness

Author: Laura Engelstein

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 1501721291

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The revolution of 1905 challenged not only the social and political structures of imperial Russia but the sexual order as well. Throughout the decade that followed-in the salons of the artistic and intellectual avant-garde, on the pages of popular romances, in the staid assemblies of physicians, psychiatrists, and legal men—the talk everywhere was of sex. This eagerly awaited book, echoing the title of a pre-World War I bestseller, The Keys to Happiness, marks the first serious attempt to understand the intense public interest in sexuality as a vital dimension of late tsarist political culture. Drawing on a strong foundation of historical sources—from medical treatises and legal codes to anti-Semitic pamphlets, commercial fiction, newspaper advertisements, and serious literature—Laura Engelstein shows how Western ideas and attitudes toward sex and gender were transformed in the Russian context as imported views on prostitution, venereal disease, homosexuality, masturbation, abortion, and other themes took on distinctively Russian hues. Engelstein divides her study into two parts, the first focusing on the period from the Great Reforms to 1905 and on the two professional disciplines most central to the shaping of a modern sexual discourse in Russia: law and medicine. The second part describes the complicated sexual preoccupations that accompanied the mobilization leading up to 1905, the revolution itself, and the aftermath of continued social agitation and intensified intellectual doubt. In chapters of astonishing richness, the author follows the sexual theme through the twists of professional and civic debate and in the surprising links between high and low culture up to the eve of the First World War. Throughout, Engelstein uses her findings to rethink the conventional wisdom about the political and cultural history of modern Russia. She maps out new approaches to the history of sexuality, and shows, brilliantly, how the study of attitudes toward sex and gender can help us to grasp the most fundamental political issues in any society.


Foundations of Christian Culture

Foundations of Christian Culture

Author: Ivan Ilyin

Publisher: Waystone Press

Published: 2019-08-06

Total Pages: 63

ISBN-13: 1732087385

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

There was a time when society was inspired by Christian principles. Art, government, society emulated, as much as possible, the search for perfection dictated by the call to virtue. Ultimately, the twentieth century's many disasters and Christendom's failure to stop revolution and world war have discredited Christianity itself in the eyes of many. Nevertheless, I am convinced that only Christianity can revitalize a culture that has lost most of its connection with beauty and that glorifies banality, variety, and diversity as ends in themselves. However, this would not be a retread of historical Christendom, but a new vision, predicated on the new realities of an increasingly Neo-pagan and Transhumanist West. According to Ivan Ilyin, "The Gospel teaches not flight from the world, but the Christianization of the world. Thus, the sciences, the arts, politics, and the social order can all be those spiritual hands with which the Christian takes the world. And the calling of a Christian is not to chop off those hands, but to imbue their work and toil with the living spirit of Christ. Christianity has a great calling, which many do not ever realize. This purpose can be defined as the creation of a Christian culture." This book is Ivan Ilyin's spiritual and practical handbook at creating Christian culture in an increasingly post-Christian world. Translated by Nicholas Kotar


Russian Masculinities in History and Culture

Russian Masculinities in History and Culture

Author: B. Clements

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2001-12-18

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0230501796

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From the romantic liaisons of Peter the Great to the birth of the Russian 'queen', this collection of essays presents recent research from the new field of Russian masculinity studies. Peasant patriarchs, aristocratic dandies, anxious young bureaucrats, workers in search of father figures, heroic warriors, promiscuous bathhouse attendants and vodka-soaked athletic stars populate this volume. Its essays take as a starting point the notion that masculinity, like femininity, has a history.