Alexander Etkind

University of Cambridge | Cam · slavic studies

This article argues that in its enormous Northern and Eastern stretches, the geographical space of Russia was shaped by the fur trade. The essay follows the boom and depletion of the fur trade in the longue durée of Russian history. The fur trade brought many Northern tribes to the edge of extermination. Hunting and trapping was intrinsically viole...

The essay offers a reading of Aleksei Iu. German's film Khrustalev, My Car! (1998) as a memory event. Khrustalev, My Car is discussed together with two other films about the Soviet past, The Cold Summer of 1953 (Aleksandr Proshkin, 1987) and Island (Pavel Lungin, 2006). Showing deep but reversible transformations of the central characters, each of...

This paper examines the available evidence on one of the most radical ideas in the history of eugenics and utopianism. In the mid-1920s, the zoology professor Ilia Ivanov submitted to the Soviet government a project for hybridizing humans and apes by means of artificial insemination. He received substantial financing and organized expeditions to Af...

Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, paperback version 2005; first edition 1994) Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003) In the last decades of the Russian Empire, Edward Gibbon's Decl...

"Not much is published on the mysterious teaching of the Khlysty and the Skoptsy," is how Pavel Mel'nikov, a government official also known as the popular writer Andrei Pecherskii, began his 1867 essay. He was wrong and he knew it. Before Mel'nikov, essays and books on the subject were composed by such widely known authors as Martyn Piletskii (a te...

The interaction of ideas, people, and epochs is what interested and motivated the author to produce this history of psychoanalysis in Russia. It is composed in such a way as to reflect the complex fabric of history: the reader will find, among chapters focused on the life and work of individuals, more general explorations of particular eras in the...