LEV GUMILEV AND THE ECOLOGY OF ETHNICITY

 
10.10.2018
 
Факультет антропологии
 
Марк Бассин

Марк Бассин (Mark Bassin) – Baltic Sea Professor in the History of Ideas, работает в Center for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University, Stockholm. Он – автор нескольких книг, в том числе The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia (Cornell University Press, 2016. Series: Culture and Society after Socialism).

Mark received his doctoral degree, in the fields of historical geography and Russian intellectual history, from the University of California-Berkeley. He has had permanent teaching positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, University College London, and the University of Birmingham. He has also had visiting appointments at UCLA, the University of Chicago, University of Copenhagen, University of Pau, and the Collegium Civitas in Warsaw. Mark's research focuses on intellectual history in East and Central Europe, primarily Russia and Germany. He is interested in issues of identity, politics and ideologies in the 19th and 20th centuries.

 

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the legacy of the historian, ethnographer, and geographer Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912–1992) has attracted extraordinary interest in Russia and beyond. The son of two of modern Russia’s greatest poets, Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev spent thirteen years in Stalinist prison camps, and after his release in 1956 remained officially outcast and professionally shunned. Out of the tumult of perestroika, however, his writings began to attract attention and he himself became a well-known and popular figure. Despite his highly controversial (and often contradictory) views about the meaning of Russian history, the nature of ethnicity, and the dynamics of interethnic relations, Gumilev now enjoys a degree of admiration and adulation matched by few if any other public intellectual figures in the former Soviet Union. In this paper, I will examine Gumilev’s complex ideas about the nature of ethnicity, and will consider what sorts of political resonances they have had in post-Soviet Russia.