Born in the twilight of the Soviet era on the periphery of that empire, Yerevan, I have been fascinated by the history of Russian imperialism in the Caucasus for a long time. From the first time I saw a map of the staggering expanse of the Romanov domain in the 19th century, I knew that I wanted to understand the nuts and bolts of how this behemoth was constructed. Over the years, my research has taken me to the archives and libraries throughout Eurasia that keep the dusty secrets of tsars and viceroys. Their stories are at the forefront of my writing and teaching.
The Golden Age of Russian literature—think Pushkin, Lermontov, and other famous novelists and poets—was at the vanguard of the Russian elite’s meeting with the Caucasus. In what has become a “classic,” Susan Layton brilliantly shows how Russian writers imagined the Caucasus as an ambiguous place—both dangerous and welcoming—populated by “noble savages,” sympathetic freedom fighters, and brutal marauders.
To many Russian aristocrats ensconced in St. Petersburg and Moscow, this was a canvas on which to implement Russia’s own “civilizing mission” to prove to a skeptical Europe that the tsarist realm belonged in the pantheon of European civilization.
This is the first book to provide a synthesising study of Russian writing about the Caucasus during the nineteenth-century age of empire-building. From Pushkin's ambivalent portrayal of an alpine Circassia to Tolstoy's condemnation of tsarist aggression against Muslim tribes in Hadji Murat, the literary analysis is firmly set in its historical context, and the responses of the Russian readership too receive extensive attention. As well as exploring literature as such, this study introduces material from travelogues, oriental studies, ethnography, memoirs, and the utterances of tsarist officials and military commanders. While showing how literature often underwrote imperialism, the book carefully explores…
From about the age of 14, I have been exploring how unusual ideas and experiences might change a person’s life. This led me to become an author and experimental psychologist studying the effects of religious beliefs, rituals, and meditation exercises on our minds and bodies. I have spent a good part of the last 4 years putting together a book which tries to answer many of my questions on the varieties of meditation practices around the world.
Tolstoy describes and plays with religious experiences across various of his novels. He doesn’t take them for granted: the initial enthusiasm and prospect of personal change seldom leads to real transformation. Here, though, in one of his last writings, we follow the contagious spell of true conversion of heart. When a serial murderer meets a pure soul his self is transformed and goes on to change the life of others.
Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828 – November 20, 1910) was a Russian writer who earned fame and global renown for his novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Writing during the late 19th century, Tolstoy lived during a literary period in which Realism flourished, and today his two novels are considered the apex of realist fiction. Tolstoy is also known for his complex and somewhat paradoxical persona, holding both moralistic and ascetic views during the final decades of his life.
I developed a fascination for Imperial Russia in childhood when I learned that my great-grandmother was born in St Petersburg, an almost exact contemporary of Nicholas II. I have studied the Romanovs and Imperial Russia for over 40 years and lectured in England (including the Victoria & Albert Museum), America, Denmark, The Netherlands, and Russia. My many books include To Free the Romanovs and Queen Victoria and the Romanovs.
This is an updated version of William Clarke’s Lost Fortune of the Tsars with additional information added since first publication. It gives a detailed, comprehensive account of the immense wealth of the Imperial family before the revolution and what happened to the money, jewels, palaces, and other riches in the chaos that followed. Faced with bank confidentiality and reluctance to talk, it reads like a detective story as the author investigates bank accounts, vaults, and jewels spirited away. The result is a fascinating account of what belonged to the Tsar’s family and what belonged to the state.
When World War I broke out in 1914 Russia's Romanov dynasty was among the world's richest families. Yet ever since the Bolsheviks executed Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra and their children at Ekaterinburg, the mystery of what happened to their wealth has remained unsolved. This book is an account of the authors' answers to the Tsar's lost fortune.
Aged seventeen, I set off for Istanbul on what turned into several decades of travels across the Muslim world. From the last nomad tents of Iran to the Sufi shrines of Pakistan and Afghanistan and the ancient cities of Syria and Yemen, I’ve met all kinds of fascinating and complex people. Although I write about the past, those living experiences always shape my approach to writing. As a biographer, I write about individuals who are intriguing but complicated—like all of us, only more so. And as a historian drawn to encounters between cultures, I write about how different parts of the world understand (and misunderstand) each other.
I am fascinated by extraordinary lives, especially lives that cross borders and cultures. I also enjoy biographies set against major historical events, all the more so when an individual life is used to show an apparently familiar era of history in a new light. Tom Reiss’s book manages all this superbly.
This book reconstructs the life of Lev Nussimbaum, who was born in Kiev in what is now Ukraine but was then imperial Russia. But he spent a good part of his life in Baku when that cosmopolitan Russian imperial port was the center of the world’s first great oil boom. Having traveled myself in the Caucasus region, as well as other former parts of the Russian Empire (and Soviet Union), I found Reiss’s account of that collapsing imperial culture quite fascinating. But it is the story of Lev—or, as he twice reinvented himself, Essad Bey and Kurban…
A thrilling page-turner of epic proportions, Tom Reiss’s panoramic bestseller tells the true story of a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince in Nazi Germany. Lev Nussimbaum escaped the Russian Revolution in a camel caravan and, as “Essad Bey,” became a celebrated author with the enduring novel Ali and Nino as well as an adventurer, a real-life Indiana Jones with a fatal secret. Reiss pursued Lev’s story across ten countries and found himself caught up in encounters as dramatic and surreal–and sometimes as heartbreaking–as his subject’s life.
I developed a fascination for Imperial Russia in childhood when I learned that my great-grandmother was born in St Petersburg, an almost exact contemporary of Nicholas II. I have studied the Romanovs and Imperial Russia for over 40 years and lectured in England (including the Victoria & Albert Museum), America, Denmark, The Netherlands, and Russia. My many books include To Free the Romanovs and Queen Victoria and the Romanovs.
To understand Imperial Russia, you have to understand its culture. From the early days of conversion to Christianity in 987, through to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, Suzanne Massie takes us on a wonderful journey through the customs and culture of this enigmatic land. We see the colourful markets and fairs, the carnival season and the traditions of Easter and Christmas, as well as the great artists, composers, writers, and dancers that Russia has produced. This is one of the most beautiful (and useful) books I have ever bought.
Details the history of Russia from the religious revolution of 987 to the political revolution of 1917, graphically describing Russia's political and cultural environments under Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great
I’m an information junkie who loves to dance. I fell in love with folk dancing at age 6, European archaeology at 11, linguistics and cognition at 21—and could never drop any of them. My scientist-father always said, “Follow the problem, not the discipline,” and I began to see how these fields could help answer each other’s questions. Words can survive for millennia—with information about what archaeologists don’t find, like oh-so-perishable cloth. Determining how to reconstruct prehistoric textiles (Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years) then led me to trace the origins of various European folk costumes, and finally even to reconstruct something about the origins of the dances themselves.
I chose this book because it is such a wide-ranging compendium of Russian folk beliefs in general (in English!) as well as of Russian customs involved in trying to ensure the fertility and health of crops, farm animals, and women, all desperately needed for the survival of the community. It is these fascinating and picturesque customs that so often get incorporated into dances. Furthermore, the Dancing Goddesses were often pressed into service for divination of the future, especially by young girls worrying about whom they would marry and how many children they would have, or if they would die first. (I accidentally witnessed one of these ceremonies in Danzig in 1993—they have not died!)
The title of this book refers to the classic time and place for magic, witchcraft, and divination in Russia. The Bathhouse at Midnight, by one of the world's foremost experts on the subject, surveys all forms of magic, both learned and popular, in Russia from the fifth to the eighteenth century. While no book on the subject could be exhaustive, The Bathhouse at Midnight does describe and assess all the literary sources of magic, witchcraft, astrology, alchemy, and divination from Kiev Rus and Imperial Russia, and to some extent Ukraine and Belorussia. Where possible, Ryan identifies the sources of the…
Conformism, religiosity, and tribalism pose an increasingly serious threat to democracy, equality, liberty, and the world order. Many public intellectuals, therefore, argue that we should try to tamp down or eliminate these tendencies. I argue the opposite. Based on decades of collaborative research with psychologists, evolutionary scientists, historians, and archaeologists, I show that the human propensities to copy, believe, and belong are here to stay, and our best hope for the future is to draw on our rich inheritance of biological and cultural evolution to harness and manage these core features of human nature more sustainably, peacefully, and consensually.
How and why have societies grown in size and complexity since the advent of farming? The tragic answer to this question lies partly in the evolution of a very specific kind of cooperation: warfare. Turchin presents a theory of how warfare increased the scale of cooperation over the course of world history but also sows seeds of conflict between the haves and the have-nots, stoking internecine conflict and dissolution.
Turchin’s ideas have contributed to our stock of plausible hypotheses about the human past, and he is one of a handful of scientists committed to testing them even-handedly.
In War and Peace and War, Peter Turchin uses his expertise in evolutionary biology to offer a bold new theory about the course of world history.
Turchin argues that the key to the formation of an empire is a society’s capacity for collective action. He demonstrates that high levels of cooperation are found where people have to band together to fight off a common enemy, and that this kind of cooperation led to the formation of the Roman and Russian empires, and the United States. But as empires grow, the rich get richer and…
Born in the twilight of the Soviet era on the periphery of that empire, Yerevan, I have been fascinated by the history of Russian imperialism in the Caucasus for a long time. From the first time I saw a map of the staggering expanse of the Romanov domain in the 19th century, I knew that I wanted to understand the nuts and bolts of how this behemoth was constructed. Over the years, my research has taken me to the archives and libraries throughout Eurasia that keep the dusty secrets of tsars and viceroys. Their stories are at the forefront of my writing and teaching.
This highly readable and concise book underscores the role of the Terek Cossacks in pushing southward the boundaries of Russia into the North Caucasus from the eighteenth century. We get a sense of the economic, geographic, and socio-political factors that shaped life on a frontier where the line between “us” and “them” was not always clear.
I love the fascinating tidbits Barrett sprinkles around important analytical discussions, such as the fact that most Cossacks in the North Caucasus were armed by silversmiths and metalworkers from the very mountain communities they were supposed to be guarding against.
An innovative frontier history of one of the most contested regions of the Russian empire, this fresh approach to Cossack history is based on extensive archival research.. The Russian conquest of the North Caucasus was one of the most difficult imperial expansions in Russian history. This innovative study focuses on the local agents of Russian imperialism, the Terek Cossacks, and the difficulties they faced as state servants and frontier settlers. In the process of negotiating between the demands of the state and the needs of their communities, Terek Cossacks created a unique frontier society, more North Caucasian than Russian, neither…
Born in the twilight of the Soviet era on the periphery of that empire, Yerevan, I have been fascinated by the history of Russian imperialism in the Caucasus for a long time. From the first time I saw a map of the staggering expanse of the Romanov domain in the 19th century, I knew that I wanted to understand the nuts and bolts of how this behemoth was constructed. Over the years, my research has taken me to the archives and libraries throughout Eurasia that keep the dusty secrets of tsars and viceroys. Their stories are at the forefront of my writing and teaching.
This compelling book applies Edward Said’s well-known framework of Orientalism to explain the contradictions of Russia’s imperial project among diverse North Caucasians as well as Georgians. Jersild gives one of the clearest examples of the elasticity of the concept of Orientalism when applied to a Russia that wasn’t confident in its own European identity.
Just as fascinating is his explanation of how and why Georgian intellectuals, in their turn, used Orientalist discourse to contrast themselves against Muslims in Russian eyes and thus secure their own position within the empire.
You can experience Russia by exploring the churches and palaces of St Petersburg and Moscow. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not my approach. For me, it has always made more sense to look at the largest country on earth from its edges, the distant mountains, steppes, forests, and waters that surround it. For three decades, I have travelled across this space, studied its languages, written books and articles about it. And I have tried to look through the lens of the diverse peoples and cultures that have been part of Russian history, for better or worse. The rise and fall of the Russian Empire are unthinkable without them.
Recommending a two-volume tome may seem odd at first sight.
But this is a truly majestic work (no pun intended). Ingeniously, Richard Wortman attributes a distinctive “scenario of power” to every Russian emperor from the 1700s to the downfall of the Romanovs in 1917, with some rulers promoting a national myth and others framing their reign as a bond of love with their subjects.
The account is deeply captivating and honest, showing every emperor and empress with all their quirks and human weaknesses, but also helping us understand their enigmatic appeal.
While the other books I recommend explore the Russian Empire “from below”, through the eyes of the people, this one is top down, focusing on how the empire and its rulers saw themselves.
The Russian imperial court, with its extravagant ceremonies and celebrations, was perhaps the most impressive theater in the world. The show, however, was no mere diversion, as Richard Wortman demonstrates in this first scholarly study of the principal myths, symbols, and rituals of Russian monarchy. Focusing on the period from the reign of Peter the Great to the death of Nicholas I, Wortman shows how the presentations and representations of the Russian ruler played a central role in the exercise of monarchical power. These presentations--from ceremonies and staged events to architectural and literary monuments--sustained an image of a supreme and…
