Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1881-1940


Book Description

This collection offers a pioneering new account of the relationship between literature and other cultural forms in Late Imperial Russia and Revolutionary Russia. The contributors here recontextualize Russian literature, and rethink the relations between literature and other cultural forms. The book examines a number of, in Bourdieu's term, "cultural fields" in late Imperial Russia: science and objectivity, national and personal identity, and consumerism and commercial culture. Including contributions from leading specialists in Russian literature, cultural history, and cultural theory, this stimulating, original, and controversial book will be a vital resource for all those interested in Russian culture during "the age of Revolution."




Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1881-1940


Book Description

IConstructing Russian Culture offers a pioneering new account of the relationship between literature and other cultural forms in Late Imperial Russia and Revolutionary Russia. The general consensus in Western study of Russia and the Soviet Union has been that understanding of `historical background' is essential to the study of `literature'. But this consensus has so far failed to produce sophisticated overviews of the culture as a whole; literary histories seldom venture outside a rigid canon of authors and literary groupings, and the account of `historical background' sometimes amount to little more than a listing of certain predictable political and social factors that can be perceived to have `influenced' (or impeded) literary developments. This book is an ambitious attempt to recontextualize Russian literature, and rethink the relations between literature and other cultural forms. The book examines a number of, in Bourdieu's term `cultural fields' in late Imperial Russia: science and objectivity; national and personal identity; consumerism and commercial culture. There is also a `keywords' introduction explaining the evolution of concepts of the self, the nation, and `literariness' in Russian culture, and an `Epilogue' outlining the further history of the central themes after 1917. Contributors include leading specialists in Russian literature, cultural history, and cultural theory from Britain, the USA, and Russia. Intended as a companion to Russian Cultural Studies: An Introduction (also OUP), this stimulating, original, and controversial book will be a vital resource for all those interested in Russian culture during `the age of Revolution'.




Youth in Revolutionary Russia


Book Description

What were the consequences if prerevolutionary and "bourgeois" culture and social relations could not be transformed into new socialist forms of behavior and belief?".




Readings on the Russian Revolution


Book Description

Readings on the Russian Revolution brings together 15 important post-Cold War writings on the history of the Russian Revolution. It is structured in such a way as to highlight key debates in the field and contrasting methodological approaches to the Revolution in order to help readers better understand the issues and interpretative fault lines that exist in this contested area of history. The book opens with an original introduction which provides essential background and vital context for the pieces that follow. The volume is then structured around four parts – 'Actors, Language, Symbols', 'War, Revolution, and the State', 'Revolutionary Dreams and Identities' and 'Outcomes and Impacts' – that explore the beginnings, events and outcomes of the Russian Revolution, as well as examinations of central figures, critical topics and major historiographical battlegrounds. Melissa Stockdale also provides translations of two crucial Russian-language works, published here in English for the first time, and includes useful pedagogical features such as a glossary, chronology, and thematic bibliography to further aid study. Readings on the Russian Revolution is an essential collection for anyone studying the Russian Revolution.




Creating the New Soviet Woman


Book Description

This book explores the Soviet attempt to propagandise the 'new Soviet woman' through the magazines Rabotnitsa and Krest'yanka from the 1920s to the end of the Stalin era. Balancing work and family did not prove easy in a climate of shifting economic and demographic priorities, and the book charts the periodic changes made to the model.




Food Culture in Russia and Central Asia


Book Description

Russia and the newly independent states of Central Asia are struggling to reassert or create national identities and are receiving fresh attention from the West. After decades of oblivion, the vast Eurasian continent is once again divulging its intense cultural heritage and foodways to the international community. The diversity of food cultures within the former Soviet Union, with more than 100 distinct nationalities, is overwhelming, but this book brilliantly distills the main elements of contemporary cuisine and food-related customs for students and foodies. Vibrant descriptions of the legacy of the Silk Road; the classic foods such as kasha, pirogi, non (flatbread), pickles, and shashlyk (shish kebab); the over-the-top Moscow theme restaurants; and meals at the dacha and tea time are just some of the highlights. Russia and the newly independent states of Central Asia are struggling to reassert or create national identities and are receiving fresh attention from the West. After decades of oblivion, the vast Eurasian continent is once again divulging its intense cultural heritage and foodways to the international community. The diversity of food cultures within the former Soviet Union, with more than 100 distinct nationalities, is overwhelming, but Food Culture in Russia and Central Asia brilliantly distills the main elements of contemporary cuisine and food-related customs for students and foodies. Vibrant descriptions of the legacy of the Silk Road; the classic foods such as kasha, pirogi, non (flatbread), pickles, and shashlyk (shish kebab); the over-the-top Moscow theme restaurants; and meals at the dacha and tea time are just some of the highlights. After centuries of contact and conflict among peoples of Eurasia, Russian and Central Asian cuisines and culinary cultures have much in common. To understand one, the other must be considered as well. Russia and Central Asia cuisines share many ingredients, dishes, and customs. This volume strives to emphasize the evolving and multifaceted nature of the food cultures. Readers will be able to appreciate the ingredients, cooking methods, and traditions that make up the Eurasian foodways.




Medical Storyworlds


Book Description

Though often seen as scientific or objective, medicine has a fundamentally narrative aspect. Much like how an author constructs meaning around fictional events, a doctor or patient narrates the course of an illness and treatment. In what ways have literary and medical storytelling intersected with and shaped each other? In Medical Storyworlds, Elena Fratto examines the relationship between literature and medicine at the turn of the twentieth century—a period when novelists were experimenting with narrative form and the modern medical establishment was taking shape. She traces how Russian writers such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov responded to contemporary medical and public health prescriptions, placing them in dialogue with French and Italian authors including Romains and Svevo and such texts as treatises by Paul Broca and Cesare Lombroso. In nuanced readings of these works, Fratto reveals how authors and characters question the rhetoric and authority of medicine and public health in telling stories of mortality, illness, and well-being. In so doing, she argues, they provide alternative ways of thinking about the limits and possibilities of human agency and free will. Bridging the medical humanities, European literary studies, and Slavic studies, Medical Storyworlds shows how narrative theory and canonical literary texts offer a new lens on today’s debates in medical ethics and bioethics.




Rethinking Class in Russia


Book Description

Social differentiation, poverty and the emergence of the newly rich occasioned by the collapse of the Soviet Union have seldom been analysed from a class perspective. Rethinking Class in Russia addresses this absence by exploring the manner in which class positions are constructed and negotiated in the new Russia. Bringing an ethnographic and cultural studies approach to the topic, this book demonstrates that class is a central axis along which power and inequality are organized in Russia, revealing how symbolic, cultural and emotional dimensions are deeply intertwined with economic and material inequalities. Thematically arranged and presenting the latest empirical research, this interdisciplinary volume brings together work from both Western and Russian scholars on a range of spheres and practices, including popular culture, politics, social policy, consumption, education, work, family and everyday life. By engaging with discussions in new class analysis and by highlighting how the logic of global neoliberal capitalism is appropriated and negotiated vis-à-vis the Soviet hierarchies of value and worth, this book offers a multifaceted and carefully contextualized picture of class relations and identities in contemporary Russia and makes a contribution to the theorisation of class and inequality in a post-Cold War era. As such it will appeal to those with interests in sociology, anthropology, geography, political science, gender studies, Russian and Eastern European studies, and media and cultural studies.




Tear Off the Masks!


Book Description

When revolutions happen, they change the rules of everyday life--both the codified rules concerning the social and legal classifications of citizens and the unwritten rules about how individuals present themselves to others. This occurred in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which laid the foundations of the Soviet state, and again in 1991, when that state collapsed. Tear Off the Masks! is about the remaking of identities in these times of upheaval. Sheila Fitzpatrick here brings together in a single volume years of distinguished work on how individuals literally constructed their autobiographies, defended them under challenge, attempted to edit the "file-selves" created by bureaucratic identity documentation, and denounced others for "masking" their true social identities. Marxist class-identity labels--"worker," "peasant," "intelligentsia," "bourgeois"--were of crucial importance to the Soviet state in the 1920s and 1930s, but it turned out that the determination of a person's class was much more complicated than anyone expected. This in turn left considerable scope for individual creativity and manipulation. Outright imposters, both criminal and political, also make their appearance in this book. The final chapter describes how, after decades of struggle to construct good Soviet socialist personae, Russians had to struggle to make themselves fit for the new, post-Soviet world in the 1990s--by "de-Sovietizing" themselves. Engaging in style and replete with colorful detail and characters drawn from a wealth of sources, Tear Off the Masks! offers unique insight into the elusive forms of self-presentation, masking, and unmasking that made up Soviet citizenship and continue to resonate in the post-Soviet world.




Performing Peace and Friendship


Book Description

Performing Peace and Friendship tells the story of how the Soviet Union succeeded in utilizing the World Festival of Youth and Students in its cultural diplomacy from late Stalinism through the early Khrushchev period. Pia Koivunen discusses the evolution of the youth gathering into a Soviet cultural product starting from the first festival held in Prague in 1947 and ending with the Moscow 1957 gathering, the latter becoming one of the most frequently referred moments of Khrushchev’s Thaw. By combining both institutional and grass-roots’ perspectives, the book widens our understanding of what Soviet cultural diplomacy was in practice, re-evaluates the agency of young people and provides new insights into the Soviet role in the cultural Cold War. Koivunen argues that rather than simply being orchestrated rallies by the Kremlin bureaucrats, the World Youth Festivals also became significant spaces of transnational encounters for young people, who found ways to employ the event for overcoming the various restrictions and boundaries of the Cold War world.