SUMMARY:

This essay introduces the publication of two chapters from Seymour Becker’s unfinished book manuscript “The Borderlands in the Mind of Russia: Russian National Consciousness and the Empire’s Non-Russians in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” Sergey Glebov and Marina Mogilner survey the entire manuscript and discuss its apparent design and the actual research logic emerging from individual chapters. They also elaborate on how the chapters published in this issue of Ab Imperio reconstruct the first stages in the making of the discursive space of Russia as a nationalizing empire during the first half of the nineteenth century.