The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia

Mark Bassin

Published by Cornell University Press 2016

The Gumilev Mystique

Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia

Mark Bassin
Preface by: Ronald Grigor Suny

In the series Culture and Society after Socialism

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501703393

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

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. Ronald Grigor Suny is William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author most recently of "They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else:" A History of the Armenian Genocide.

Reviews

Serguei Alex. Oushakine, Princeton University, author of The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia:

In 1996, the government of independent Kazakhstan named a new university after him. In 2005, the capital of Tatarstan commemorated his work by erecting a statue in the middle of Kazan. There is a mountain peak in the Altai range and a street in the Kalmyk Elista named after him. A son of Russia's two major poets, a prisoner of the Gulag, a celebrity historian, and a key figure behind the revival of the Eurasianist movement, Lev Gumilev was the man who provided postsocialist nationalisms with a conceptual lexicon and theoretical models. In this lucid and informative book, Mark Bassin meticulously reconstructs historical details, social networks, and intellectual contexts that shaped Gumilev's essentializing theory of 'biological communities’ and their ethnogenesis. The Gumilev Mystique is an important and timely biography of the ideas that continue to constitute the theoretical core of nation building processes in postcommunist societies.

Vera Tolz-Zilitinkevic, University of Manchester, author of Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods:

A son of two great Russian poets and an inmate of Stalin's Gulag, Lev Gumilev was the founding father of neo-Eurasianism, a powerful ideological framework for claiming Russia's special civilization and for justifying its predominance on the territory of the USSR. In tracing the origins and transformation of Gumilev’s theories, this book provides the best available explanation of the appeal of neo-Eurasianism in Russia,including among its top political leaders.

David G. Anderson, University of Aberdeen, author of Identity and Ecology in Arctic Siberia: The Number One Reindeer Brigade:

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.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Foreword Ronald Grigor Suny Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xiii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part 1. Gumilev’s Theory of Ethnos and Ethnogenesis
1. The Nature of Ethnicity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
2. Ethnogenesis, Passionarnost′, and the Biosphere Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	43
3. Varieties of Ethnic Interaction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	60
4. The Ethnogenetic Drama of Russian History Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	81
Part 2. The Soviet Reception of Gumilev
5. Soviet Visions of Society and Nature Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
6. Ethnicity as Ideology and Politics Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	146
7. Gumilev and the Russian Nationalists Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	177
Part 3. GUMILEV AFTER COMMUNISM
8. Neo-Eurasianism and the Russian Question Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	209
9. Biopolitics and the Ubiquity of Ethnicity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	244
10. “The Patron of the Turkic Peoples” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	273
Conclusion: The Political Significance of Gumilev Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	306
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	317
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	365

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 400
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 6
- Images: 6
- Other: 7 halftones
Keywords: Soviet Union collapse; Lev Nikolaevich; Gumilev; Russian poets; perestroika; Anna Akhmatova; Political and social USSR discourse

eBook

Published: February 4, 2016
ISBN: 9781501703393