SUMMARY

This is a Russian-language version of the presidential address delivered by Bruce Grant, the president of ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies), before the members of the association at the forty-third annual ASEEES convention that took place in Washington, DC, on November 17–20, 2011. Grant suggests his interpretation of the meaning of being “Eurasian.” This interpretation is based on critical observations of recent developments in our field as well as on Grant’s personal experience as a researcher of regions and cultures different from his own. He is less concerned with which countries are included in any given concept of “Eurasia” than with what the promise of these continually shifting alignments offers us as scholars looking for better ways to understand the past, the present, and the future. Grant suggests that the idea of Eurasia, at its core, enables us to move past the same kind of stock-in-trade assumptions about metropoles and hinterlands that have long bedeviled studies of Europe and its colonies. The “Eurasian” approach, in Grant’s interpretation, makes the lesser-known peoples and regions of the world area we study not peripheral to our own ranges of vision, or even to the metropoles that have historically governed them. They are approached as central, unto themselves. Being Eurasian, in this context, is nothing more than a reminder of how difficult it is to keep one’s eyes and ears open to the multiple flows of sense, sensibility, context, and experience that constitute the worlds we seek to better understand. The acceptance of such “Eurasianism” inserts an existential moment into the ASEEES collective project, Grant concludes, a recognition of the impossibility, or perhaps better put, the quixotic project of living in someone else’s shoes, no matter what part of the world we are from, of occupying other times, other spaces, other knowledges, and other lives.