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Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964-1985
What did it mean to be a Soviet citizen in the 1970s and 1980s? How can we explain the liberalization that preceded the collapse of the USSR? This period in Soviet history is often depicted as stagnant with stultified institutions and the oppression of socialist citizens. However, the socialist state was not simply an oppressive institution that dictated how to live and what to think--it also responded to and was shaped by individuals' needs. In Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964-85, Neringa Klumbyte and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova bring together scholarship examining the social and cultural life of the USSR and Eastern Europe from 1964 to 1985. This interdisciplinary and comparative study explores topics such as the Soviet middle class, individualism, sexuality, health, late-socialist ethics, and civic participation. Examining this often overlooked era provides the historical context for all post-socialist political, economic, and social developments.
Akunin Project
You don't know his name, but Boris Akunin is one of the most popular and prolific Russian writers of the twenty-first century.
Seasoned Socialism
This essay anthology explores the intersection of gender, food and culture in post-1960s Soviet life from personal cookbooks to gulag survival. Seasoned Socialism considers the relationship between gender and food in late Soviet daily life, specifically between 1964 and 1985. Political and economic conditions heavily influenced Soviet life and foodways during this period and an exploration of Soviet women’s central role in the daily sustenance for their families as well as the obstacles they faced on this quest offers new insights into intergenerational and inter-gender power dynamics of that time. Seasoned Socialism considers gender construction and performance across a wide array of primary sources, including poetry, fiction, film, women’s journals, oral histories, and interviews. This collection provides fresh insight into how the Soviet government sought to influence both what citizens ate and how they thought about food.
Displacement and (Post)memory in Post-Soviet Women’s Writing
The book examines prominent literary works from the past two decades by Russian women writers dealing with the Soviet past. It explores works such as Daniel Stein, Interpreter by Ludmilla Ulitskaya, The Time of Women by Elena Chizhova, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich, and In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, and uncovers connecting thematic structures and features. Focusing on the concepts of displacement and postmemory, the book shows how these works have given voice to those on the margins of society and of ‘great history’ whose resistance was often silent. In doing so, these women writers portray the everyday experiences and trauma of displaced women and girls during the second half of the twentieth century. This study offers new insights into the importance of these women writers’ work in creating and preserving cultural memory in post-Soviet Russia.
A History of Russian Literature
Russia possesses one of the richest and most admired literatures of Europe, reaching back to the eleventh century. A History of Russian Literature provides a comprehensive account of Russian writing from its earliest origins in the monastic works of Kiev up to the present day, still rife with the creative experiments of post-Soviet literary life. The volume proceeds chronologically in five parts, extending from Kievan Rus' in the 11th century to the present day.The coverage strikes a balance between extensive overview and in-depth thematic focus. Parts are organized thematically in chapters, which a number of keywords that are important literary concepts that can serve as connecting motifs a...
The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen
This book demonstrates the ways in which the kitchen - the centerpiece of domesticity and consumerism - was deployed as a recurring motif in the ideological and propaganda battles of the Cold War. Beginning with the famous Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate, Baldwin shows how Nixon turned the kitchen into a space of exception, while contemporary writers, artists, and activists depicted it as a site of cultural resistance. Focusing on a wide variety of literature and media from the United States and the Soviet Union, Baldwin reveals how the binary logic at work in Nixon's discourse - setting U.S. freedom against Soviet totalitarianism - erased the histories of slavery, gender subordination, colonialism, and racial genocide. The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen treats the kitchen as symptomatic of these erasures, connecting issues of race, gender, and social difference across national boundaries. This rich and rewarding study - embracing the literature, film, and photography of the era - will appeal to a broad spectrum of scholars.
The Prose of Life
Both before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, everyday life and the domestic sphere served as an ideological battleground, simultaneously threatening Stalinist control and challenging traditional Russian gender norms that had been shaken by the Second World War. The Prose of Life examines how six female authors employed images of daily life to depict women’s experience in Russian culture from the 1960s to the present. Byt, a term connoting both the everyday and its many petty problems, is an enduring yet neglected theme in Russian literature: its very ordinariness causes many critics to ignore it. Benjamin Sutcliffe’s study is the first sustained examination of how and why ever...
The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw
Following Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union experienced a dramatic resurgence in cinematic production. The period of the Soviet Thaw became known for its relative political and cultural liberalization; its films, formally innovative and socially engaged, were swept to the center of international cinematic discourse. In The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw, Lida Oukaderova provides an in-depth analysis of several Soviet films made between 1958 and 1967 to argue for the centrality of space—as both filmic trope and social concern—to Thaw-era cinema. Opening with a discussion of the USSR's little-examined late-fifties embrace of panoramic cinema, the book pursues close readings of films by Mikhail Kalatozov, Georgii Danelia, Larisa Shepitko and Kira Muratova, among others. It demonstrates that these directors' works were motivated by an urge to interrogate and reanimate spatial experience, and through this project to probe critical issues of ideology, social progress, and subjectivity within post–Stalinist culture.
Reading Darwin in Imperial Russia
A 2023 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title Reading Darwin in Imperial Russia: Literature and Ideas expands upon the cataloging efforts of earlier scholarship on Darwin’s reception in Russia to analyze the rich cultural context and vital historical background of writings inspired by the arrival of Darwin’s ideas in Russia. Starting with the first Russian translation of The Origin of Species in 1864, educated Russians eagerly read Darwin’s works and reacted in a variety of ways. From enthusiasm to skepticism to hostility, these reactions manifested in a variety of published works, starting with the translations themselves, as well as critical reviews, opinion journalism, literary f...
Holy Sobriety in Modern Russia
Drawing on multiple archives and primary sources, including secret police files and samizdat, Holy Sobriety in Modern Russia reconstructs the history of a spiritual movement that survived persecution by the Orthodox church and decades of official atheism, and still exists today. Since 1894, tens of thousands of Russians have found hope and faith through the teachings and prayers of the charismatic lay preacher and healer, Brother Ioann Churikov (1861–1933). Inspired by Churikov's deep piety, "miraculous" healing ability, and scripture-based philosophy known as holy sobriety, the "trezvenniki"—or "sober ones"—reclaimed their lives from the effects of alcoholism, unemployment, domestic a...
