Description:
Through real and imagined geographies, examining post-Soviet debates about what it means to be Russian today.
Brief description: Edith W. Clowes is the Brown-Forman Professor of Arts and Sciences in the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures at the University of Virginia. Her books include Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity, also from Cornell, Doctor Zhivago: A Critical Companion, The Revolution of Moral Consciousness: Nietzsche and Russian Literature, and Russian Experimental Fiction: Resisting Ideology after Utopia.
Review Quotes:
"In Russia on the Edge, Edith Clowes investigates how and why borders are so central in today's Russia. She brilliantly demonstrates that much of Russian identity is defined not by what Russia is but rather where Russia is. Indeed peripheries function imaginatively as the sites of vital debates about how Russians see themselves. Clowes therefore offers a must-read analysis of how geographical and geopolitical metaphors construct post-Soviet Russian identity."
--Marlene Laruelle, The Johns Hopkins University