Leah M. Feldman

“On the Threshold of Eurasia” explores the imagining of the Russian and Soviet “East” in the construction of literary modernity during the revolutionary transition in the Caucasus, from 1905 to 1929. It exposes the ways in which a diverse body of Russian and Azeri Turkic poetry, scholarship, and political essays—many of which are unknown to Anglophone readers—contributed to the construction of the Soviet multinational empire. Tracing the circulation of romantic and avant-garde visions of Eurasian modernity, the book illustrates the pivotal role of the former Soviet periphery in shaping the aesthetic and critical innovations of the early twentieth century.