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.

"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."

• Introduction Part 1 GUMILEV'S THEORY OF ETHNOS AND ETHNOGENESIS1. The Nature of Ethnicity2. Ethnogenesis, Passionarnost′, and the Biosphere 3. Varieties of Ethnic Interaction 4. The Ethnogenetic Drama of Russian History Part 2 THE SOVIET RECEPTION OF GUMILEV5. Soviet Visions of Society and Nature 6. Ethnicity as Ideology and Politics 7. Gumilev and the Russian Nationalists Part 3 GUMILEV AFTER COMMUNISM8. Neo-Eurasianism and the Russian Question 9. Biopolitics and the Ubiquity of Ethnicity 10. "The Patron of the Turkic Peoples" Conclusion: The Political Significance of Gumilev

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.

"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."

• Introduction Part 1 GUMILEV'S THEORY OF ETHNOS AND ETHNOGENESIS1. The Nature of Ethnicity2. Ethnogenesis, Passionarnost′, and the Biosphere 3. Varieties of Ethnic Interaction 4. The Ethnogenetic Drama of Russian History Part 2 THE SOVIET RECEPTION OF GUMILEV5. Soviet Visions of Society and Nature 6. Ethnicity as Ideology and Politics 7. Gumilev and the Russian Nationalists Part 3 GUMILEV AFTER COMMUNISM8. Neo-Eurasianism and the Russian Question 9. Biopolitics and the Ubiquity of Ethnicity 10. "The Patron of the Turkic Peoples" Conclusion: The Political Significance of Gumilev

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.

"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."

• Introduction Part 1 GUMILEV'S THEORY OF ETHNOS AND ETHNOGENESIS1. The Nature of Ethnicity2. Ethnogenesis, Passionarnost′, and the Biosphere 3. Varieties of Ethnic Interaction 4. The Ethnogenetic Drama of Russian History Part 2 THE SOVIET RECEPTION OF GUMILEV5. Soviet Visions of Society and Nature 6. Ethnicity as Ideology and Politics 7. Gumilev and the Russian Nationalists Part 3 GUMILEV AFTER COMMUNISM8. Neo-Eurasianism and the Russian Question 9. Biopolitics and the Ubiquity of Ethnicity 10. "The Patron of the Turkic Peoples" Conclusion: The Political Significance of Gumilev