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4.8 - The Non-Russian

from History 4 - Heroes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2024

By
Michael Kunichika
Edited by
Simon Franklin ,
Rebecca Reich  and
Emma Widdis
Simon Franklin
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Rebecca Reich
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Emma Widdis
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

Tracing the figure of the ‘non-Russian’ across nearly three centuries of Russian writing and literary tendencies, this chapter considers how it came to embody cultural and philosophical values against which Russian writers sought to measure their own culture, history, and politics. The chapter shows that the ‘non-Russian’ was a figure central to a range of writers who grappled with Russia’s position between the symbolic antinomies of East and West, confronted the Russian and Soviet empires or emerged out of it, or used the figure to formulate what ‘Russianness’ could mean. As the constant companion of their ‘Russian’ counterparts, the ‘non-Russian’ figures examined in this chapter include those created by ethnically Russian writers as well as those who wrote in Russian while also navigating their own ethnic identities within various historical contexts and literary tendencies.

Keywords

ethnicitynationalityotherothernessRussophoneempireidentity
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature , pp. 806 - 823
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Brower, Daniel R., and Lazzerini, Edward J. (eds.), Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Dudley, Edward J., and Novak, Maximillian E. (eds.), The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973).Google Scholar
Hokanson, Katya, Writing at Russia’s Border (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Layton, Susan, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Mathewson, Rufus W., The Positive Hero in Russian Literature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Ram, Harsha, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Sunderland, Willard, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).Google Scholar

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