Provides a synthesising study of Russian writing about the Caucasus during the 19th-century age of empire-building.

Focusing on the Tsarist and Soviet empires of Russia, Lieven reveals the nature and meaning of all empires throughout history. He examines factors that mold the shape of the empires, including geography and culture, and compares the Russian empires with other imperial states, from ancient China and Rome to the present-day United States. Illustrations.

The Imperial Sublime examines the rise of the Russian empire as a literary theme simultaneous with the evolution of Russian poetry between the 1730s and 1840—the century during which poets defined the main questions facing Russian literature and society. Harsha Ram shows how imperial ideology became implicated in an unexpectedly wide range of issues, from formal problems of genre, style, and lyric voice to the vexed relationship between the poet and the ruling monarch.

While Western literature has long reflected the techniques of power that privileged the colonial masters and their point of view, Russian fictional and nonfictional texts have escaped such scrutiny because Russia is not generally considered a colonial power. In arguing that Russia's long history of territorial expansion is a form of colonization, this book uses postcolonial theory to examine Russian literature and the power structures reflected in it. Among the authors discussed are Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn.

Both Russian and Ukrainian writers have explored the politics of identity in the post-Soviet period, but while the canon of Russian imperial thought is well known, the tradition of resistance - which in the Ukrainian case can be traced as far back as the meeting of the Russian and Ukrainian polities and cultures of the seventeenth century - is much less familiar."--BOOK JACKET.

This collection of essays resituates poetic works by Derzhavin, Krylov, Batisushkov, Pushkin, Girboedov, Lermontov, Baratynsky and Pavlova, within the force fields of contradicoty cultural pressures, as are the once best-selling prose narratives of Narezhnyi, Karamzin, Viazemsky and others.