Abstracts
Russia on Edge: Reclaiming the Periphery in Contemporary Russian Culture
Interdisciplinary Workshop, 11-12 December 2009 (CRASSH, University of Cambridge)
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University of Groningen
Centre and Borders in Dugin & Prokhanov
"Pour nous faire remarquer, il nous a fallu nous tendre du dtroit de Behring jusqu' l'Oder" (Chaadaev; italics mine - SB)
The "Empire thinkers" (impertsy) in post-Soviet Russia, from Eurasianists like Aleksandr Dugin to "derzhavniki" like Aleksandr Prokhanov and even Petersburg fundamentalists like Pavel Krusanov and Aleksandr Sekatskii, can all be seen as representatives of the "revolt of the local against claims of the global". These "locals" not just claim a higher ranking in the international hierarchy: they imagine a Russian Empire (that was lost but should be restored) that is not just located in a global (mathematical-physical) continuum, but that itself as it were generates its spatial contours, and in which the concepts of space and of the socio-political are connected in a way that makes it impervious to the universalist claims of the "global".
Noticeable underneath, however, is a struggle with the feeling that Russia is a periphery to a culturally dominant centre (as it was noticeable with the impertsy's intellectual forefather Carl Schmitt and British capitalist colonial dominance). The impertsy thus show the well-known hybridity of post-colonial thinking about periphery and centre - which in this case is generated by a situation of internal colonization.
This way of thinking thus shows traces of a post-traumatic disorientation (the 'absence' of the Empire - that never really was - is converted into 'loss'; LaCapra). The hybridity in external, international periphery-centre thinking makes the Empire's own space shaky: whereas in principle it should be static and concentric, this stasis is now lost, under threat, the centre is temporarily unavailable, 'displaced' (to be restored only in the future); which leads to a special role of the periphery: it is the border where the struggle with the non-Empire takes place, the main weight of the Empire is now to be found there. These theses will be illustrated mainly by two novels, Krusanov American Hole (Американская дырка, 2005) and Prokhanov's The Hill (Холм, 2008), both of which are situated in Pskov.