Internal Colonization: The Imperial Experience

The book by the renowned philologist and historian, professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Alexander Etkind, discusses how the Russian Empire seized foreign territories and developed its own lands, colonizing many peoples, including the Russians themselves. Etkind elaborates on the limits of applying Western concepts of colonialism and Orientalism to Russian culture, the formation of the language of self-colonization among Russian historians, serfdom and peasant commune as colonial institutions, and the attempts of literature to resolve the issues of internal colonization posed by Russian history in its own way. Moving from history to literature and back again, Etkind provides unexpected interpretations of critical texts about the imperial experience, authored by Defoe and Tolstoy, Gogol and Conrad, Kant and Bakhtin.

5th edition.