The Gumilev Mystique

"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." -- David G. Anderson, University of Aberdeen, author of <I>Identity and Ecology in Arctic Siberia: The Number One Reindeer Brigade</I> "A son of two great Russian poets and an inmate of Stalin's Gulag, Lev Gumilev was the founding father of neo-Eurasianism, a powerful ideological framework for claiming Russia's special civilization and for justifying its predominance on the territory of the USSR. In tracing the origins and transformation of Gumilevs theories, this book provides the best available explanation of the appeal of neo-Eurasianism in Russia,including among its top political leaders." -- Vera Tolz-Zilitinkevic, University of Manchester, author of <I>Russias Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods</I> "In 1996, the government of independent Kazakhstan named a new university after him. In 2005, the capital of Tatarstan commemorated his work by erecting a statue in the middle of Kazan. There is a mountain peak in the Altai range and a street in the Kalmyk Elista named after him. A son of Russia's two major poets, a prisoner of the Gulag, a celebrity historian, and a key figure behind the revival of the Eurasianist movement, Lev Gumilev was the man who provided postsocialist nationalisms with a conceptual lexicon and theoretical models. In this lucid and informative book, Mark Bassin meticulously reconstructs historical details, social networks, and intellectual contexts that shaped Gumilev's essentializing theory of 'biological communities and their ethnogenesis. The Gumilev Mystique is an important and timely biography of the ideas that continue to constitute the theoretical core of nation building processes in postcommunist societies." -- Serguei Alex. Oushakine, Princeton University, author of <I>The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia</I>

Mark Bassin is Baltic Sea Professor of the History of Ideas at Sdertrn University in Stockholm. He is the author of Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 18401865 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.

Introduction Part 1 GUMILEV'S THEORY OF ETHNOS AND ETHNOGENESIS 1. The Nature of Ethnicity 2. Ethnogenesis, Passionarnost, and the Biosphere 3. Varieties of Ethnic Interaction 4. The Ethnogenetic Drama of Russian History Part 2 THE SOVIET RECEPTION OF GUMILEV 5. Soviet Visions of Society and Nature 6. Ethnicity as Ideology and Politics 7. Gumilev and the Russian Nationalists Part 3 GUMILEV AFTER COMMUNISM 8. 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