Russia's Rome
Russia's Rome

Author: Judith E. Kalb

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2010-07-15

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 0299229238

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A wide-ranging study of empire, religious prophecy, and nationalism in literature, Russia’s Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940 provides the first examination of Russia’s self-identification with Rome during a period that encompassed the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the rise of the Soviet state. Analyzing Rome-related texts by six writers—Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Valerii Briusov, Aleksandr Blok, Viacheslav Ivanov, Mikhail Kuzmin, and Mikhail Bulgakov—Judith E. Kalb argues that the myth of Russia as the “Third Rome” was resurrected to create a Rome-based discourse of Russian national identity that endured even as the empire of the tsars declined and fell and a new state replaced it. Russia generally finds itself beyond the purview of studies concerned with the ongoing potency of the classical world in modern society. Slavists, for their part, have only recently begun to note the influence of classical civilization not only during Russia’s neo-classical eighteenth century but also during its modernist period. With its interdisciplinary scope, Russia’s Rome fills a gap in both Russian studies and scholarship on the classical tradition, providing valuable material for scholars of Russian culture and history, classicists, and readers interested in the classical heritage.

Moscow, the Fourth Rome
Moscow, the Fourth Rome

Author: Katerina Clark

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-11-15

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 0674062892

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the early sixteenth century, the monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the "Third Rome." By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome, Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world. Clark provides an interpretative cultural history of the city during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge. She draws on the work of intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to shed light on the singular Zeitgeist of that most Stalinist of periods. In her account, the decade emerges as an important moment in the prehistory of key concepts in literary and cultural studies today-transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and world literature. By bringing to light neglected antecedents, she provides a new polemical and political context for understanding canonical works of writers such as Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bakhtin. Moscow, the Fourth Rome breaches the intellectual iron curtain that has circumscribed cultural histories of Stalinist Russia, by broadening the framework to include considerable interaction with Western intellectuals and trends. Its integration of the understudied international dimension into the interpretation of Soviet culture remedies misunderstandings of the world-historical significance of Moscow under Stalin.

The New Third Rome
The New Third Rome

Author: Jardar Østbø

Publisher: Ibidem Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 9783838209005

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Drawing on theories of political myth and concepts of nationalism, Jardar Østbø analyzes the content and ideological function of the myth of Russia as a Third Rome. Through case studies of four prominent nationalist intellectuals, Østbø shows how this messianic myth was used to reinvent Russia and its allegedly rightful place in the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Though it exists in many radically different versions, the Third Rome myth in general embodies particularism and rabid anti-Westernism. At best, it portrays Russia as an essentially isolationist country. At worst, it casts the country as superior to all other nations, divinely elected to rule the world.

Russian Messianism
Russian Messianism

Author: Peter J. S. Duncan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-11

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1134744773

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This unique work will be of great interest to those engaged in politics and Russian studies, as well as professionals dealing with Russia.

The Legacy of Ancient Rome in the Russian Silver Age
The Legacy of Ancient Rome in the Russian Silver Age

Author: Anna Frajlich

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 9042022515

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

'This thoughtful and well-researched manuscript is an important contribution to several fields: 19th- and 20th-century Russian literature and philosophy, Classics and literary history. Many 20th-century Russian writers employ comparisons between 20th-century Russia and the Roman Empire, but this study is the first in-depth look at the basis for this all pervasive theme. Since the end of the Soviet Union the Symbolist period has become one of primary interest for Russians as they attempt to investigate elements of their pre-Soviet identity. The writers whose works are included here represent some of the most sophisticated and erudite in the whole of Russian literature, but many of them were, until recently [?] little studied or looked at through a distorting political prism.'Carol Ueland, Professor of Russian Literature, Drew University

Maximilian Voloshin’s Poetic Legacy and the Post-Soviet Russian Identity
Maximilian Voloshin’s Poetic Legacy and the Post-Soviet Russian Identity

Author: M. Landa

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-06-10

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1137477857

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Famed and outspoken Russian poet, Maximilian Voloshin's notoriety has grown steadily since his slow release from Soviet censorship. For the first time, Landa showcases his vast poetic contributions, proving his words to be an overlooked solution both to the political and cultural turmoil engulfing the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century.

Irreverence and the Sacred
Irreverence and the Sacred

Author: Hugh Urban

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-11-02

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0190911980

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Irreverence and the Sacred brings together some of the most cutting edge, interdisciplinary, and international scholars working today in order to debate key issues in the critical and comparative study of religion. The project is inspired in large part by the work of Bruce Lincoln, whose influential and wide-ranging scholarship has consistently posed challenging, provocative, and often-irreverent questions that have really pushed the boundaries of the field of religious studies in important, sometimes controversial ways. Retracing the history of the discipline of religious studies, Lincoln argues that the field has tended to champion a "validating, feel-good" approach to religion, rather than posing more critical questions about religious claims to authority and their role in history, politics, and social change. A critical approach to the history of religions, he suggests, would focus on the human, temporal, and material aspects of phenomena that are claimed to have a superhuman, eternal, or transcendent status. This volume takes up Lincoln's challenge to "do better," by engaging in critical analyses of four key themes in the study of religion: myth, ritual, gender, and politics. The book also interrogates the "politics of scholarship" itself, critically examining the relations of power and material interests at work in the study as well as the practice of religion. The scholars involved in this project include not only some of the most important figures in the American study of religion--such as Wendy Doniger, Russell McCutcheon, Ivan Strenski, and Lincoln himself--but also European scholars whose work is hugely influential overseas but not as well known in the U.S.--such as Stefan Arvidsson, Claude Calame, Nicolas Meylan, and others.

Longing for the Lost Caliphate
Longing for the Lost Caliphate

Author: Mona Hassan

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-01-10

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 1400883717

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the United States and Europe, the word "caliphate" has conjured historically romantic and increasingly pernicious associations. Yet the caliphate's significance in Islamic history and Muslim culture remains poorly understood. This book explores the myriad meanings of the caliphate for Muslims around the world through the analytical lens of two key moments of loss in the thirteenth and twentieth centuries. Through extensive primary-source research, Mona Hassan explores the rich constellation of interpretations created by religious scholars, historians, musicians, statesmen, poets, and intellectuals. Hassan fills a scholarly gap regarding Muslim reactions to the destruction of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad in 1258 and challenges the notion that the Mongol onslaught signaled an end to the critical engagement of Muslim jurists and intellectuals with the idea of an Islamic caliphate. She also situates Muslim responses to the dramatic abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924 as part of a longer trajectory of transregional cultural memory, revealing commonalities and differences in how modern Muslims have creatively interpreted and reinterpreted their heritage. Hassan examines how poignant memories of the lost caliphate have been evoked in Muslim culture, law, and politics, similar to the losses and repercussions experienced by other religious communities, including the destruction of the Second Temple for Jews and the fall of Rome for Christians. A global history, Longing for the Lost Caliphate delves into why the caliphate has been so important to Muslims in vastly different eras and places.

Putin's People
Putin's People

Author: Catherine Belton

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2020-06-23

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 0374712786

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller | A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Named a best book of the year by The Economist | Financial Times | New Statesman | The Telegraph "[Putin's People] will surely now become the definitive account of the rise of Putin and Putinism." —Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic "This riveting, immaculately researched book is arguably the best single volume written about Putin, the people around him and perhaps even about contemporary Russia itself in the past three decades." —Peter Frankopan, Financial Times Interference in American elections. The sponsorship of extremist politics in Europe. War in Ukraine. In recent years, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has waged a concerted campaign to expand its influence and undermine Western institutions. But how and why did all this come about, and who has orchestrated it? In Putin’s People, the investigative journalist and former Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him rose to power and looted their country. Delving deep into the workings of Putin’s Kremlin, Belton accesses key inside players to reveal how Putin replaced the freewheeling tycoons of the Yeltsin era with a new generation of loyal oligarchs, who in turn subverted Russia’s economy and legal system and extended the Kremlin's reach into the United States and Europe. The result is a chilling and revelatory exposé of the KGB’s revanche—a story that begins in the murk of the Soviet collapse, when networks of operatives were able to siphon billions of dollars out of state enterprises and move their spoils into the West. Putin and his allies subsequently completed the agenda, reasserting Russian power while taking control of the economy for themselves, suppressing independent voices, and launching covert influence operations abroad. Ranging from Moscow and London to Switzerland and Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach—and assembling a colorful cast of characters to match—Putin’s People is the definitive account of how hopes for the new Russia went astray, with stark consequences for its inhabitants and, increasingly, the world.

Vergil in Russia
Vergil in Russia

Author: Zara Martirosova Torlone

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2014-11-27

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 019100362X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Russian reception of the greatest Roman poet, Vergil, provided Russian thinkers with a way in which to define Russian-European features. This volume looks to uncover the nature of Russian reception of Vergil, and argues that the best way to analyse his presence in Russian letters is to view it in the context of the formation and development of Russian national and literary identity. Russian reception of Vergil began to play an integral role in the eighteenth century - starting with the reforms of Peter the Great - and continued to be an important point of reference for Russian writers well into the last part of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it took on a spiritual, almost messianic mission, while towards the end of the millennium the post-modernist Vergil of Joseph Brodsky contemplated the fate of a poet in the world. However, Russian reception of Vergil offers significantly more than mere foreign importation or imitation of the beliefs and attitudes towards Vergil developed in Europe. It provides a gateway to understanding Russian eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought about national identity and values, and uncovers important sources of later thinking about the character and destiny of Russia. Vergil in Russia reveals that at the centre of Russian reception of Vergil is Russia's challenge to define the character and validity of their own civilization. Vergil's poems, especially the Aeneid, gave Russian men of letters an opportunity to think about and act upon national self-determination in both political and cultural terms.