On the Spot: Daniel Beer
The historian of Russia on Dostoevsky, Foucault and sympathy for the Bolsheviks.
Why are you a historian of Russia?
I read Dostoevsky when I was 16 and became hooked on Russian culture and history.
What’s the most important lesson history has taught you?
It exposes the limits of our imagination in the present.
Which book has had the greatest influence on you?
Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.
What book in your field should everyone read?
Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilisation.
Which moment would you most like to go back to?
Slightly macabre, I know, but I’d like to witness the mock execution of Dostoevsky in St Petersburg in 1848.
Which historian has had the greatest influence on you?
Laura Engelstein’s writings on 19th-century Russian cultural history.
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