Description:
In The Gumilev Mystique, Mark Bassin investigates the complex structure of Lev Gumilev's theories, revealing how they reflected and helped shape a variety of academic as well as political and social discourses in the USSR, and he traces how his authority has grown yet greater across the former Soviet Union.
Brief description: Mark Bassin is Baltic Sea Professor of the History of Ideas at Södertörn University in Stockholm. He is the author of Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865 and coeditor most recently of Between Europe and Asia: The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism.
Review Quotes:
"The Gumilev Mystique is by far the most authoritative account in English on the ideas and life of a scholar whose star is still rising in Eurasia. In this widely researched book, Mark Bassin explains the popularity of Gumilev and explores the process by which a somewhat repressed figure in the Stalinist period became a guru of the post-Soviet period. The book reads extremely well and has a quality to it that makes the reader want to know what will come next from this outlandish figure whose real life is stranger than fiction."
--David G. Anderson, University of Aberdeen, author of Identity and Ecology in Arctic Siberia: The Number One Reindeer Brigade