Access to East European and Eurasian Culture


Book Description

Gain an up-to-date overview of the evolving nature of access to scholarly publishing and acquisitions on East Europe and Eurasia Access to East European and Eurasian Culture: Publishing, Acquisitions, Digitization, Metadata presents a wide-ranging overview of current information access issues in the Slavic and East European field. This valuable resource is a helpful guide to acquisitions from border areas less commonly covered, including Greece, Ukraine, and Central Asia. Slavic specialists will find a range of answers to some of the most salient information access issues now confronting the East European and Eurasian field. This careful selection of superb presentations from a 2006 conference on Book Arts, Culture, and Media in Russia, East Europe and Eurasia: From Print to Digital focuses on access challenges and advances in publishing, acquisitions, digitization, and metadata. Access to East European and Eurasian Culture: Publishing, Acquisitions, Digitization, Metadata provides a clear picture of the trends and technological developments now impacting library collections and acquisitions. This one expansive volume presents helpful tables with publishing statistics, lists of web sites, workflow charts and diagrams, several figures, and MARC templates. The book is extensively referenced. Topics discussed in Access to East European and Eurasian Culture: Publishing, Acquisitions, Digitization, Metadata include: publishing trends and diversification in Russia, East Europe, and Eurasia since the early 1990s access to scholarly texts from underrepresented areas in US Slavic collections Slavic studies' library acquisitions from Central Asia, Greece, and Ukraine Slavic digital access designing and maintaining large- to small-scale digital projects in the Slavic field MARC21 and XML as tools for access to Slavic metadata library-scholar collaboration in promoting digital access to Slavic scholarship Access to East European and Eurasian Culture: Publishing, Acquisitions, Digitization, Metadata is an essential resource for Slavic librarians, educators, and students who seek to improve their knowledge of new access mechanisms and technology applications in Slavic studies.




Between Europe and Asia


Book Description

Between Europe and Asia analyzes the origins and development of Eurasianism, an intellectual movement that proclaimed the existence of Eurasia, a separate civilization coinciding with the former Russian Empire. The essays in the volume explore the historical roots, the heyday of the movement in the 1920s, and the afterlife of the movement in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The first study to offer a multifaceted account of Eurasianism in the twentieth century and to touch on the movement's intellectual entanglements with history, politics, literature, or geography, this book also explores Eurasianism's influences beyond Russia. The Eurasianists blended their search for a primordial essence of Russian culture with radicalism of Europe's interwar period. In reaction to the devastation and dislocation of the wars and revolutions, they celebrated the Orthodox Church and the Asian connections of Russian culture, while rejecting Western individualism and democracy. The movement sought to articulate a non-European, non-Western modernity, and to underscore Russia's role in the colonial world. As the authors demonstrate, Eurasianism was akin to many fascist movements in interwar Europe, and became one of the sources of the rhetoric of nationalist mobilization in Vladimir Putin's Russia. This book presents the rich history of the concept of Eurasianism, and how it developed over time to achieve its present form.




Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe


Book Description

Bringing together important new work by an international and interdisciplinary group of leading scholars, Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe approaches emotions as a phenomenon complexly intertwined with society, culture, politics, and history. The stories in this book involve sensitive aristocrats, committed revolutionaries, aggressive nationalists, political leaders, female victims of sexual violence, perpetrators and victims of Stalinist terror, citizens in the former Yugoslavia in the wake of war, workers in post-socialist Romania, Balkan Romani "Gypsy" musicians, and veterans of the Afghan and Chechen wars. These essays explore emotional perception and expression not only as private, inward feeling but also as a way of interpreting and judging a troubled world, acting in it, and perhaps changing it. Essential reading for those interested in new perspectives on the study of Russia and Eastern Europe, past and present, this volume will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities who are seeking new and deeper approaches to understanding human experience, thought, and feeling.




The Space of the Book


Book Description

Skilfully connecting multidisciplinary sources along broad historical continuum, The Space of the Book will be a valuable resource as the study of Russian print culture takes on new directions in a digitized world.




Eurasian Integration and the Russian World


Book Description

This volume examines Russian discourses of regionalism as a source of identity construction practices for the country's political and intellectual establishment. The overall purpose of the monograph is to demonstrate that, contrary to some assumptions, the transition trajectory of post-Soviet Russia has not been towards a liberal democratic nation state that is set to emulate Western political and normative standards. Instead, its foreign policy discourses have been constructing Russia as a supranational community which transcends Russia's current legally established borders. The study undertakes a systematic and comprehensive survey of Russian official (authorities) and semi-official (establishment affiliated think tanks) discourse for a period of seven years between 2007 and 2013. This exercise demonstrates how Russia is being constructed as a supranational entity through its discourses of cultural and economic regionalism. These discourses associate closely with the political project of Eurasian economic integration and the "Russian world" and "Russian civilization" doctrines. Both ideologies, the geoeconomic and culturalist, have gained prominence in the post-Crimean environment. The analysis tracks down how these identitary concepts crystallized in Russia's foreign policies discourses beginning from Vladimir Putin's second term in power.




Cultural Change in East-Central European and Eurasian Spaces


Book Description

This book weaves together research on cultural change in Central Europe and Eurasia: notably, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. Examining massive cultural shifts in erstwhile state-communist nations since 1989, the authors analyze how the region is moving in both freeing and restrictive directions. They map out these directions in such arenas as LGBTQ protest cultures, new Russian fiction, Polish memory of Jewish heritage, ethnic nationalisms, revival of minority cultures, and loss of state support for museums. From a comparison of gender constructions in 30 national constitutions to an exploration of a cross-national artistic collaborative, this insightful book illuminates how the region’s denizens are swimming in changing tides of transnational cultures, resulting in new hybridities and innovations. Arguing for a decolonization of the region and for the significance of culture, the book appeals to a wide, interdisciplinary readership interested in cultural change, post-communist societies, and globalization.




Byzantium in Eastern European Visual Culture in the Late Middle Ages


Book Description

Byzantium in Eastern European Visual Culture in the Late Middle Ages focuses on how the heritage of Byzantium was continued and transformed alongside local developments in the artistic and cultural traditions of Eastern Europe between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.




Russia and Central Asia


Book Description

This introduction to Central Asia and its relationship with Russia helps restore Central Asia to the general narrative of Russian and world history.




Empires of the Silk Road


Book Description

An epic account of the rise and fall of the Silk Road empires The first complete history of Central Eurasia from ancient times to the present day, Empires of the Silk Road represents a fundamental rethinking of the origins, history, and significance of this major world region. Christopher Beckwith describes the rise and fall of the great Central Eurasian empires, including those of the Scythians, Attila the Hun, the Turks and Tibetans, and Genghis Khan and the Mongols. In addition, he explains why the heartland of Central Eurasia led the world economically, scientifically, and artistically for many centuries despite invasions by Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Chinese, and others. In retelling the story of the Old World from the perspective of Central Eurasia, Beckwith provides a new understanding of the internal and external dynamics of the Central Eurasian states and shows how their people repeatedly revolutionized Eurasian civilization. Beckwith recounts the Indo-Europeans' migration out of Central Eurasia, their mixture with local peoples, and the resulting development of the Graeco-Roman, Persian, Indian, and Chinese civilizations; he details the basis for the thriving economy of premodern Central Eurasia, the economy's disintegration following the region's partition by the Chinese and Russians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the damaging of Central Eurasian culture by Modernism; and he discusses the significance for world history of the partial reemergence of Central Eurasian nations after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Empires of the Silk Road places Central Eurasia within a world historical framework and demonstrates why the region is central to understanding the history of civilization.




The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia


Book Description

This Handbook is the key reference for contemporary historical and political approaches to gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Leading scholars examine the region’s highly diverse politics, histories, cultures, ethnicities, and religions, and how these structures intersect with gender alongside class, sexuality, coloniality, and racism. Comprising 51 chapters, the Handbook is divided into six thematic parts: Part I Conceptual debates and methodological differences Part II Feminist and women’s movements cooperating and colliding Part III Constructions of gender in different ideologies Part IV Lived experiences of individuals in different regimes Part V The ambiguous postcommunist transitions Part VI Postcommunist policy issues With a focus on defining debates, the collection considers how the shared experiences, especially communism, affect political forces’ organization of gender through a broad variety of topics including feminisms, ideology, violence, independence, regime transition, and public policy. It is a foundational collection that will become invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines including Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Central-Eastern European and Eurasian Studies.