because the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have faced a big obstacle of identification. Soviet ideology rested on a trust in ancient growth, however the post-Soviet mind's eye has obsessed over territory. certainly, geographical metaphors—whether axes of north vs. south or geopolitical photos of heart, outer edge, and border—have turn into the symptoms of a unique feel of self and the signposts of a brand new debate approximately Russian identification. In Russia at the area Edith W. Clowes argues that refurbished geographical metaphors and imagined geographies supply an invaluable point of view for interpreting post-Soviet debates approximately what it capacity to be Russian today.Clowes lays out a number of facets of the controversy. She takes as a backdrop the powerful feedback of Soviet Moscow and its self-image as uncontested worldwide hub by means of significant modern writers, between them Tatyana Tolstaya and Viktor Pelevin. the main vocal, obvious, and colourful rightist ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, the founding father of neo-Eurasianism, has articulated positions contested by way of such writers and thinkers as Mikhail Ryklin, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and Anna Politkovskaia, whose works demand a brand new civility in a certainly pluralistic Russia. Dugin’s severe perspectives and their many responses—in fiction, movie, philosophy, and documentary journalism—form the physique of this book.In Russia at the facet literary and cultural critics will locate the keys to an essential post-Soviet writing tradition. For highbrow historians, cultural geographers, and political scientists the ebook is a advisor to the diversity of post-Soviet efforts to examine new varieties of social lifestyles, while a reconstructed authoritarianism has taken carry. The booklet introduces nonspecialist readers to a few of the main inventive and provocative of present-day Russia’s writers and public intellectuals.