“Geopoetics” may be a novel concept for Russian studies, but the term is by no means new. The Scottish poet and critic Kenneth White coined it in 1978, inaugurating an international intellectual and creative movement of the same name that has gained particular momentum in the new millennium. Its urgency in a world that has grown exponentially more connected and networked yet, paradoxically, remains deeply bound to the “iconology of space and place” is evident from the way in which the cultural theorist W. J. T. Mitchell, in conversation with Edward Said and others in the symbolically freighted location of Birzeit University in the West Bank, recouped the term as the organizing principle of a special issue of Critical Inquiry in 2000. If anything, geopoetics as an animating force as well an analytical framework for what Mitchell identifies as “social and political life,” “experience,” and “history” appears in even starker relief against the myriad transnational conflicts that define the globe in 2016 within which, in turn, the region we study has been rapidly redefining itself vis-à-vis the world.

To Gleb Uspenskii's contemporaries, his preference for short forms like sketches, notes, and fragments masked an artistic fl aw – his inability to produce a novel. The paper reconsiders Uspenskii's generic choices as a deliberate critique of the novel form. This critique refl ected Uspenskii's anxiety about the signifi cance of individual personality and experience overvalued by the novel. Uspenskii's aspiration to transcend the novel's preoccupation with an individual human fate in order to lay bare the conditions shaping the shared destiny of all led him to exchange the novel's “microscopic” optics for a broader, panoramic lens. Such change in perspective dictated several other elements of his poetics: from rejecting the novel's aesthetics of small detail to reconfi guring the traditional character structure.

Numismatic advertisements of competing claims to the title of grand prince served as a useful propaganda medium during the Muscovite succession struggles of the 1400s but also yielded a persistent slippage between coins' function of proclaiming political legitimacy and conferring that legitimacy. This article outlines the mutually symbolizing relation between coinage and succession in the cultural imagination of the Daniilovich dynasty and beyond. It focuses on verbal tropes, succession practices, and economic functions by turns in order to elucidate the rhetorical matrix that identified the legitimacy of the tsar and of money and to sketch out its evolving applications. First, I read passages from Ivan IV's first letter to Prince Kurbskii to show how the tsar conceived of usurpation as a falsified succession suggestive of falsified coin. Then, I treat early Muscovite coins that articulated family relationships, especially conflicts between primogenitary and collateral principles of inheritance. Finally, I relate the sovereign to the material artifact of money, particularly coins representing him as a mintmaster or as an executioner poised to punish counterfeiters, in order to contextualize efforts by enemies of the state to command numismatic symbols. In all of these contexts, the perception of legitimate succession is intertwined with a currency of signs and the circulation of specie.

The German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941 brought with it the most extreme conditions of the short twentieth century. Suddenly, the existence of the Soviet state was no longer assured. What the regime did in response tells us much about Stalinism and the Soviet order. In an enormous swathe of territory from the western and southern borderlands of the USSR to the ethnic Russian heartland, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Operation Barbarossa triggered successive regime changes and reversals with which everyone had to reckon. States and armies were hardly the only critically important actors, moreover, as the war unleashed local conflicts and nationalist movements. In sum, aft er years of extreme statism and isolation, millions of Soviet citizens suddenly faced fateful decisions about what to do and how to act.

This essay investigates the geopoetic strategies through which Muslim writers contributed to as well as undermined the consolidation of the Russian literary canon. Its central focus is the Azeri writer Celil Memmedquluzade’s translation of Gogol’’s work, revealing the politicization of Gogol”s poetics in the Muslim south Caucasus in 1905. Drawing upon Gogol’’s prose about the Russian provinces, its translation in the Caucasus, and its resurrection in literary theory, I illustrate the ways in which the poetics of the imperial provinces intersected with the Russian and Soviet imperial gaze, highlighting the internalizing force of imperial expansion as well as the radical alterity of the colonial experience. The early twentieth century was marked by a series of revolutionary upheavals in the imperial capital and periphery, as well as a Bolshevik ideological campaign to envision literature as an enlightened enterprise, that is, one characterized by both its scientific and political power. In dialectical fashion, the creation of a revolutionary poetics involved a repetition of Gogol’’s prose in order to reconcile and thus transcend the series of binaries associated with nineteenth century literature: center/periphery, oral/written, self/other. Gogol’’s resurrection in Memmedquluzade’s translations and in the hands of his Formalist and postcolonial critics highlights the role of Russian imperial geopoetics in simultaneously sustaining and subverting a revolutionary literary culture

Odessa was founded on the fault line between autocratic agricultural Russia and the international trade routes of emerging global capitalism. It was the place where the use value of agricultural products was converted into the exchange value of commodities. In the rift between these two systems of values, and between the epistemological and psychological perceptions associated with them, a third kind of ontological and epistemological space emerged. This space was conditioned by the evolving patterns of the Odessa grain trade regulated by stock trading, and induced in its turn a unique perception of time, history, and the relation between the real and fi ctitious. This article pinpoints the link between the mechanisms of the Odessa grain trade, the patterns of subjectivity and temporal perception that were molded by Odessa's business culture, and the modes of literary representation that elaborated these patterns into a specific literary idiom associated with Odessa literature.

The most important Russian artistic movement of the end of the twentieth century, Moscow conceptualism has been described as sectarian, esoteric, and self-absorbed, with an affinity for substituting longwinded commentaries for visual images. Such definitions, while compelling for some participants in the movement, fail to describe adequately the work of a number of unofficial Moscow artists from the late Soviet period, particularly the so-called second generation of conceptualists. This is partly the result of a critical tendency to misconstrue the role words actually play in the work of second-generation artists and to conflate their use of painted text with that of other Moscow conceptualists. Closer attention to the kinds of texts these artists include in their pictorial creation and their intent in doing so suggests that they represent a significant but understudied development in this still misunderstood group.

Central Russia’s Riazan´ province was on the front lines of World War II for two weeks in late 1941. Placed between German and Soviet forces, the province was on the edges of authorities’ ability to exert full control over the region. In that time, Soviet power dissolved in the countryside. Peasants raided warehouses and dismantled collective farms while enterprising local notables aided the embryonic occupation regime. Documents created during the two weeks and their immediate aft ermath show that rural Russians, even collaborators, defied simple classification as anti-Soviet. Instead, they exhibited survivalist instincts and a traditional antipathy toward central authority rather than a preference for either German or Soviet power. As Soviet power returned to Riazan´ authorities grappled with the mass upheaval that the power vacuum had enabled. Unlike later interpretations, which would stress the role of German atrocities in occupation regimes, Riazan´ authorities blamed “anti-Soviet elements” among the province’s population.

On the eve of the World War I, members of the Russian right deeply differed in their visions of the status quo and the means of its proper reconstruction. The war further differentiated the Right. The rightists, regardless of the ideological nuances, perceived the war as a chance for political revival. The outburst of patriotism in July and August 1914 became the most serious argument in favor of political reform. Their opponents, on the contrary, saw in it a chance to get rid of democratic institutions and practices. While the more moderate rightists leaned towards consensus, with liberals looking at political dialogue as the most effective instrument for securing social stability, the extreme ones concluded that strict control from above was a more adequate instrument for achieving this goal. All this aggravated the pre-war conflicts within the Right and led to its disintegration on the eve of the Revolution of 1917.

This essay seeks to reconstruct the history of the first Tashkent Festival of Cinemas of Asia and Africa (1968). It offers an account of the festival as a highly heterogeneous and productive site for better understanding the complex relationship between the Soviet bloc and the Third World in the crucial moment between the victory of post-colonial independence movement and the end of the Cold War.

Based on a wide range of sources, this article explores the aims, methods, and evolution of Romanian occupation policy in southwestern Ukraine and the local non-Jewish population’s reactions to it. It shows that the policy was more oppressive than is usually assumed and that it resulted in a substantial deterioration of relations between occupiers and occupied, especially in the countryside.

This article analyzes the development of Soviet scientific future studies after World War II, arguing that the field's theory and methods undermined the certainty of the communist future and laid the foundations for a new Soviet governmentality that acknowledged the intrinsic uncertainty of future development. The emphasis on uncertainty—but also the need for more data that could freely circulate between different branches of government and hence more transparency (glasnost')—called for radical revisions to Soviet notions of effective governance. Whereas some used future studies to criticize the actual practices of Soviet economic planning, others used this new type of expertise to extend personal influence and accumulate organizational power. Both cases, however, made it clear that Soviet governance had to accommodate the shift toward new constellations of power/knowledge in which scientific experts would play an ever-increasing role in shaping policy with regard to a fundamentally uncertain future.