Soil and soul : the symbolic world of Russianness

In recent years the issue of identity has come to occupy the centre of political, sociological, anthropological and cultural studies.

Nationality is not the only identity-defining contemporary discourse, even if it is now one of the most dominant ones.

But, whatever avenues are opened up in the exploration of contemporary identities, whether in the name of nations, humanities, classes, races, cultures, ethnicities, genders, or social movements, they remain constrained by ontological, political and discursive options expressed in claims about the sovereignty of territorial states.

This book is concerned with the various connections and restraints that exist between the changing historical reality of the Russian territorial state and the ideal world of national mythology.

It comprises of essays devoted to national self-consciousness in Russia, the empire that vanished in 1917, together with its traditional symbolism. A continuity of symbolic expression is traced between seemingly diverse patterns of pre and post-Revolutionary Russian social life: between Russian autocracy and the Soviet leader cult; orthodoxy and unquestioning faith in the only true Communist ideaology; and also between Russian nationalism and Soviet collectivism and populism.

The main aim is to provide an orientation in the symbolic world of Russian self-identification, and thus to outline a comprehensive background to the current political discourse about the road to the future Russia.