Perhaps the most consistent biographical reference to the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev (1853-1900) concerns his unusual guffaw: “When he laughed, his loud infectious laughter ‘with unexpected, outrageous, and hiccup-like high notes’ would drown out all other voices.” Scholars usually explain this laughter as a sign of Solov‘ev's otherworldly perception and his occasionally inappropriate descent into our mundane realm. Observing this “infectious laughter,” Evgenii Trubetskoi found an explanation in his friend's supposed ethereal character: “He was so nearsighted that he did not see what others saw. Squinting under his thick brows, he could make out items at close range only with difficulty. But when his glance searched into the distance, it seemed to penetrate beyond the surface accessible to our external senses and to see something otherworldly, hidden from all the rest. His eyes shone with some kind of internal light and gazed directly into the soul.” Aleksandr Blok, who claimed to have been greatly affected by a chance meeting with the strange philosopher, called him “pure spirit, as if an image instead of a living man–an outline, a symbol, a sketch.”

On Sunday, February 24, 1852, the epilogue to the tragicomedy which was N. V. Gogol's life was played out in the University Chapel in Moscow. Curiosity seekers, government officials, members of high society—“people who had not wanted to know Gogol during his lifetime,” Khomiakov bitterly remarked later—thronged the final rites performed over the writer’s emaciated body. Among the crowd in the chapel was Gogol's old acquaintance, N. F. Pavlov (1803-64), a former serf, actor, university student, law clerk, and journalist who had made his way into Moscow’s beau monde and had married a wealthy heiress.

Anyone familiar with Soviet history can identify A. I. Rykov: Lenin’s successor as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, a major leader of Right Communism, a victim of Stalin’s purges. But this tells us very little. Because of Rykov’s predilection for practical as opposed to ideological-literary work, his relative colorlessness in comparison with the other Bolshevik luminaries, and a lack of material, he has not been attractive to scholars. Yet Rykov looms large within the Bolshevik movement; he was prominent long before the revolution as well as after 1917. Furthermore, the seeds of Rykov’s positions of the 1920s—which clearly had an impact on the policies and politics of those years—were definitely sown before 1917.

“Geopoetics” may be a novel concept for Russian studies, but the term is by no means new. The Scottish poet and critic Kenneth White coined it in 1978, inaugurating an international intellectual and creative movement of the same name that has gained particular momentum in the new millennium. Its urgency in a world that has grown exponentially more connected and networked yet, paradoxically, remains deeply bound to the “iconology of space and place” is evident from the way in which the cultural theorist W. J. T. Mitchell, in conversation with Edward Said and others in the symbolically freighted location of Birzeit University in the West Bank, recouped the term as the organizing principle of a special issue of Critical Inquiry in 2000. If anything, geopoetics as an animating force as well an analytical framework for what Mitchell identifies as “social and political life,” “experience,” and “history” appears in even starker relief against the myriad transnational conflicts that define the globe in 2016 within which, in turn, the region we study has been rapidly redefining itself vis-à-vis the world.