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2021 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

3. Asia Before Eurasianism: The Pre-Revolutionary Roots of a Russian Emigré Ideology

Author : David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye

Published in: The Return of Eurasia

Publisher: Springer Singapore

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Abstract

Eurasianism evolved from nineteenth–century ideas that Russia also had an Asian identity. Like the Slavophiles, proponents of this notion stressed their nation’s differences with the West. However, while the former argued that they were European, albeit very different from the continent’s “Roman-German” western half, such Asianists stressed their kinship with the East. Their leading advocates built on the ideas of Nikolai Karamzin, Petr Chaadaev, Aleksandr Herzen, Vladimir Titov, and Baron Roman Undern von Sternberg.

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previous chapter Greater Eurasia: From Geopolitical Pole to International Society?

next chapter Greater Eurasia as a Conservative Initiative

Russia is not only in Europe, but also in Asia… A Russian is not only a European but also an Asian. F. M. Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelia. 1880 i 1881 [Diary of a Writer. 1880 and 1881] (Moscow and Berlin, DirectMedia, 2015), 120.

M. O. Gershenzon, Chaadaev: Zhizn’ i myshlenie (St. Petersburg: Tip. M. M. Stasulevich, 1908); Gordon Cook: “Peter Chaadaev: The Making of a Cultural Critic, 1826–1818,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Neue Folge 21:4 (1973), 560–572.

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Not to be confused with the contemporary Russian colloquialism meaning “to get high”.

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Ookhtomsky, Travels in the East of Nicholas II, vol. II, 32.

Ookhtomsky, Travels in the East of Nicholas II, vol. II, 446.

The most detailed study in English is Stefani Hope Hoffman, “Scythianism: A Cultural Vision in Revolutionary Russia” (Unpublished PhD dissertation: Columbia University, 1957). See also N. V. Kuzina, “Ideologiia skifstva v russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli i literatury” in Gosudarstvenno-patrioticheskaia ideologiia i problemy ee formirovaniia (Smolensk: Izdatel’stvo Voennoi akademii, 1997), 95–97.

K. D. Balmont, Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1969), 150.

Ettore Lo Gatto, “Panmongolismo di V. Solovëv, i venienti unni di V. Brjusov e Gli Sciti di A. Blok” in For Roman Jakobson, edited by Morris Halle, et al. (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1956), 300.

Aleksandr Blok, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura 1968), 231.

Willard Sunderland, The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); S. L. Kuzmin, Istoriia barona Ungerna: opyt rekonstruktsii (Moscow: Tov. Nauchnykh izdanii KMK, 2011).

S. L. Kuzmin, ed., Baron Ungern v dokumentakh i memuarakh (Moscow: Tov. Nauchnykh izdanii KMK, 2004), 201.

Kuzmin, Baron Ungern, 388.

Perhaps recalling Vladimir Solov’ev’s poem of 1890, “Ex Oriente Lux,” in idem,, Chteniia o Bogochelovechestve; Stati; Stikhotovreniia i poema; Iz trekh razgovorov (St. Petersburg: Khudozhestvennaia literatura,1994), p. 385.

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For a well written account, see Peter Hopkirk, Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin’s Dream of an Empire in Asia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985).

Title: Asia Before Eurasianism: The Pre-Revolutionary Roots of a Russian Emigré Ideology
Author: David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye
Publisher: Springer Singapore
Book: The Return of Eurasia
Print ISBN: 978-981-16-2178-9

Electronic ISBN: 978-981-16-2179-6

Copyright Year: 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2179-6_3