Brings discussion of Alexei Ivanov and his literary imagination of Russia into the context of settler colonial studies, particularly into conversations about Indigeneity, settler place-making, and decoloniality that are still emerging in Russia-based literary criticism.

Unsettling Russia With Alexei Ivanov elucidates the settler colonial assumptions in Russian self-portrayal by examining four novels and two popular histories set in Ivanov's home region around the Ural Mountains. These works, popular in Russia but not yet translated into English, offer keen insight into the period of history when the early Muscovite state was still expanding and had not yet become the Russian empire. Megan Dixon reveals the fraught negotiation between settlers and the Native inhabitants of Siberian and steppe landscapes as they sought to make themselves belong.

Drawing on Indigenous thought for a critique of the settler imagination, the book uses a revised geopoetics to analyze concepts of belonging at the local and regional scales as well as to capture Ivanov's attention to the details of regional geography. It crafts readings of Indigenous and settler culture and economy that account for their interaction with ecological realia, making the setting a web of forces in which protagonists move and to which they must react.

Using multiple lenses to view Ivanov's work, Unsettling Russia With Alexei Ivanov suggests a contingent view of “Russia” and unsettles Russian identity by digging into its colonial past