Russia’s Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890-1940 (University of Wisconsin Press), by Judith E. Kalb

From the 1890s through the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia underwent a cultural renaissance historians call the "Silver Age." Russian studies professor Judith Kalb explores one particular literary facet of that era in the form of a half-dozen novelists who used allegories of Rome in their work. Subjecting their texts to deep analysis, Kalb understands that the idea of Rome had a particular significance in Russia (whose Orthodox Church elevated Moscow as the new Rome) and special meaning for these authors. Mostly they asserted that Russia was destined as the bridge between East and West, paganism and Christianity, rationalism and spirituality. Kalb concludes by following these ideas into the Stalin era and beyond, where they often survived in cryptic form.