2017

Honorable Mention: Mark Bassin
Title: The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia (Cornell University Press)

Mark Bassin has written a deeply researched and erudite study of the thought of Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912-1992), known to most of us as the son of Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova. Lev Nikolaevich was not only an important thinker in his own right, but, in his creative synthesis of a specific genre of Eurasianist ideas, the generator of an intellectual system whose components have great resonance in post-Soviet Russia, including with Vladimir Putin. Bassin excavates Gumilev’s “Eurasianist” ideas in a narrative that elaborates with great skill on their origins, development, and reception, taking us from the Silver Age to the post-Soviet present. His painstaking research has unearthed the personal networks that allowed Gumilev to re-enter Soviet academic life after his return from the camps, and that also caused his ideas to be disseminated as broadly as they were during the Soviet period. To read this book is to possess a greater understanding of how certain Eurasianist ideas were poised, by the end of the Soviet period, to have the post-Soviet influence that they have had. The prodigious effort that Bassin brought to the book—so evident on every page—is all the more impressive given that their one meeting in 1980 did not, from the author’s perspective, go well. It also required supreme intellectual dedication to write an authoritative study of a thinker known as an anti-Semite and disdainful of empirical rigor.

Winner: Aileen Kelly