Humanities & Social Sciences 3 (2016 9) 675-677 ~ ~ ~ УДК 89.02 Review of the collective volume Siberian Identity in the Mirror of Literature: Tropes, Topoi, and Genres from the Nineteenth to Twenty-First Century (edited by N.V. Kovtun) Jens Herlth* University of Fribourg Rue du Criblet 13 , CH-1700 Fribourg, Switzerland Received 30.01.2016, received in revised form 02.02.2016, accepted 24.02.2016 The present review provides a critical assessment of the book “Siberian Identity in the Mirror of Literature: Tropes, Topoi, and Genres from the Nineteenth to Twenty-First Century” edited by N.V. Kovtun. <...> The volume Siberian Identity in the Mirror of Literature contains seventeen essays that approach varying aspects of Siberia as a territory, geographical space, and cultural construction; the range of topics includes socio-ideological, mythological, and religious ideas and motives in Russian literature from the last two centuries. <...> Part I, “The Literary Image of Siberia from the Nineteenth to Twenty-First Century: From Ideology to Imagology,” explores the genesis of the image of Siberia in the Russian cultural consciousness. <...> Most of the authors adopt a sociohistorical perspective: section are thoroughly based on source material; the fi ndings are carefully analyzed with recourse to the latest developments in the sociology of © Siberian Federal University. <...> The general level of theoretical and methodological sophistication, along with the abundance of material, which is either new or shown for the fi rst time from a highly innovative theoretical angle, make this section the strongest and the most interesting part of the book. <...> The authors demonstrate how the image of Siberia emerged through the collision of the imagined space of a desert or a netherworld on the one hand, and the concrete geographical and social realities on the other. <...> These articles analyze the ideological and epistemological preconditions as well as the side effects of the integration of Siberia into the common cultural and geographical space of Russia. <...> The philological approach applied to historical documents reveals aspects that would have remained beyond the Jens Herlth. <...> Review of the collective volume Siberian Identity in the Mirror of Literature: Tropes, Topoi, and Genres… scope of purely historical analysis, such as the diversity of stylistic layers in travelogues and texts about Siberia. <...> Part II is devoted to the utopian, religious, esoteric and sometimes even concepts and myths refl ected in the literature about Siberia or in Siberian literature in the proper sense. <...> The focus is on the traditionalist and conservative tendencies <...>