Russia's New Fin de Siècle

Description

This volume investigates Russian culture at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with scholars from Britain, Sweden, Russia and the United States exploring aspects of culture with regard to one overarching question: What is the impact of the Soviet discourse on contemporary culture? This question comes at a time when Russia is concerned with integrating itself into European arts and culture while enhancing its uniqueness through references to its Soviet past. Thus, contributions investigate the phenomenon of post-Soviet culture and try to define the relationship of contemporary art to the past.

 

Introduction: Russia’s New fin de siècle: Contemporary Culture between Past and Present  PART I: Written Discourse Chapter 1: The Function of the Soviet Experience in Post-Soviet Discourse – Maria Litovskaya Chapter 2: Cycles, Continuity and Change in Contemporary Russian Culture – Mark Lipovetsky Chapter 3: Victor Pelevin and the Void – Meghan Vicks Chapter 4: From Homo Zapiens to Media Sapiens: Post-Soviet Television in Russian Fiction – Andrei Rogatchevski PART II: Visual and Popular Culture  Chapter 5: Afrika and Monroe – Post-Soviet Appropriation, East and West – Amy Bryzgel Chapter 6: Military Dandyism, Cosmism and Eurasian Imper-Art – Maria Engström Chapter 7: Sweet Dreams: Retro Imagery on Chocolate Packaging in Post-Soviet Russia – Bettina Jungen Chapter 8: Victory Day: Rituals and Practices of War Commemoration in Russia – Nataliya Danilova PART III: Cinematic Culture  Chapter 9: A Kiss for the KGB: Putin as Cinematic Hero – Stephen M. Norris Chapter 10: ‘Address Your Questions to Dostoevsky’: Privatizing Punishment in Russian Cinema – Serguei Alex. Oushakine Chapter 11: Freedom and Uncertainty: The Cinema of Slava Tsukerman – Peter Rollberg Chapter 12: Muratova’s Cinema before and after Perestroika: Deconstructing and Rebuilding Film Aesthetics – Eugénie Zvonkine Chapter 13: The Place of Action Must Not be Changed: Aleksei Balabanov’s St Petersburg – Birgit Beumers

Sujets

• Social Science
• Performing Arts
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Russian culture
• General officer
• Soviet Union
• History of film
• Anthropology
• General
• Cultural Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783200863
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Cover designer: Ellen Thomas
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Production manager: Melanie Marshall/Tom Newman
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-84150-730-9
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-085-6
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-086-3
Printed and bound by Hobbs the Printers Ltd, UK
Contents
Acknowledgements
Contributors’ Notes
Introduction: Russia’s New fin de siècle: Contemporary Culture between Past and Present
PART I: Written Discourse
Chapter 1:The Function of the Soviet Experience in Post-Soviet Discourse
Maria Litovskaya
Chapter 2:Cycles, Continuity and Change in Contemporary Russian Culture
Mark Lipovetsky
Chapter 3:Victor Pelevin and the Void
Meghan Vicks
Chapter 4:From Homo Zapiens to Media Sapiens: Post-Soviet Television in Russian Fiction
Andrei Rogatchevski
PART II: Visual and Popular Culture
Chapter 5:Afrika and Monroe – Post-Soviet Appropriation, East and West
Amy Bryzgel
Chapter 6:Military Dandyism, Cosmism and Eurasian Imper-Art
Maria Engström
Chapter 7:Sweet Dreams: Retro Imagery on Chocolate Packaging in Post-Soviet Russia
Bettina Jungen
Chapter 8:Victory Day: Rituals and Practices of War Commemoration in Russia
Nataliya Danilova
PART III: Cinematic Culture
Chapter 9:A Kiss for the KGB: Putin as Cinematic Hero
Stephen M. Norris
Chapter 10:‘Address Your Questions to Dostoevsky’: Privatizing Punishment in Russian Cinema
Serguei Alex. Oushakine
Chapter 11:Freedom and Uncertainty: The Cinema of Slava Tsukerman
Peter Rollberg
Chapter 12:Muratova’s Cinema before and after Perestroika: Deconstructing and Rebuilding Film Aesthetics
Eugénie Zvonkine
Chapter 13:The Place of Action Must Not be Changed: Aleksei Balabanov’s St Petersburg
Birgit Beumers
Index
Acknowledgements
This book is largely the result of discussions at the International Congress of Slavists (ICCEES) in Stockholm in 2010, organized by Irina Sandomirskaya, who is the godmother of this volume.
I would like to thank all the contributors for their patience and commitment, but especially Mark Lipovetsky for his unwavering support. I would also like to thank Melanie Marshall at Intellect for her patience, competence and commitment, and especially the designers Holly Rose and Ellen Thomas who have shown again an exquisite sense of style! And a huge thank you to Tom Newman, who has competently seen through the final production process.
A Note on Transliteration: We have used Library of Congress transliteration, except where a particular spelling is widely accepted (Yeltsin, Dostoevsky) and where otherwise indicated (i.e. where a particular translation of a novel has been used for references).
Contributors’ Notes
Birgit Beumers is Professor in Film Studies at Aberystwyth University. She completed her D.Phil at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and taught at Bristol University’s Russian Department from 1994–2012. She specializes in contemporary Russian culture and has published widely on cinema and theatre. Her most recent publications include A History of Russian Cinema (2009) and, with Mark Lipovetsky, Performing Violence (2009), as well as Nikita Mikhalkov (2005), PopCulture Russia! (2005); she has edited 24 Frames: Russia (2007); The Post-Soviet Russian Media (2009, with S. Hutchings and N. Rulyova), Alexander Shiryaev, Master of Movement (2009, with D. Robinson and V. Bocharov), Directory of World Cinema: Russia (2010) and (with Nancy Condee) The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov (2011). She is currently working on Russian animation. She is editor of the online quarterly KinoKultura and of the scholarly journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema that appears thrice a year.
Amy Bryzgel received her PhD in Art History from Rutgers University in 2008, and has been a Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Aberdeen since 2009. Her research is focused on performance art from East-Central Europe and Russia. She has published a book titled Performing the East: Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland since 1980 (2013), which presents case studies of performance artists working both before and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Her work aims to nuance current understandings of contemporary performance art, by considering the genre as it developed within Eastern Europe. She has also just completed a monograph of the Latvian painter and performance artist, Miervaldis Polis.
Nataliya Danilova holds a PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Nottingham. Her academic interests include civil-military relations, politics of war memory and commemoration in Britain, Russia and in the United States. She is currently working on the international politics of commemoration in post-conflict societies. She also holds a degree in Sociology and served as Lecturer in Sociology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (St Petersburg Campus). She currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Nottingham. She has published on veterans’ politics in Russia, civil-military relations and war memory of post-Soviet conflicts.
Maria Engström has studied Russian philology at the Moscow State University in 1988–91 and gained a PhD in Slavic languages at Stockholm University in 2004. She held a research fellowship from Swedish Research Council in 2005–07. Her research has also been supported by grants from Helge Ax:son Johnson Foundation, Birgit and Gad Rausing Foundation for Humanistic Research and Magnus Bergvall Foundation. She has taught Russian language, literature and cultural history at Stockholm University, Uppsala University, Dalarna University, Södertörn University College and Stockholm School of Economics. Since 2012 she is Head of Russian at the School of Languages and Media at Dalarna University. Engström’s current research examines the post-Soviet conservative intellectual milieu and explores cultural manifestation of identity in contemporary Russia.
Bettina Jungen earned her doctoral degree in 2005 at Zurich University with a dissertation about Soviet sculptor Vera Mukhina. She taught courses on European, American and Russian art at the universities of Zurich and Basel and schools for continued education. Bettina published about Russian and Soviet art. Her research interests include sculpture, Russian art of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries and popular visual culture. Since 2009 she is the curator of Russian art at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, Massachusetts.
Mark Lipovetsky is a literary critic and culture historian. He is Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder (USA). In 1996 he defended one of the first doctoral dissertations on the topic of post-modernism. Lipovetsky is the author of eight books and co-editor of seven volumes on Russian literature and culture. Among his monographs are Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos (1999), Modern Russian Literature: 1950s – 1990s (in Russian, co-authored with his father Naum Leiderman, 2001), Paralogies: Transformation of (Post)modernist Discourse in Russian Culture of the 1920s – 2000s (in Russian, 2008), Performing Violence: Literary and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama (2009, with Birgit Beumers; in Russian, 2012) and Charms of Cynical Reason: The Transformations of the Trickster Trope in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture (2011). Co-edited volumes include Dictionary of Literary Biography: Russian Writers Since 1980 (2003), an anthology of Russian and Soviet wonder-tales (2005) and Russian twentieth-century short stories (2011), Jolly Little Characters: Cult Heroes of the Soviet Childhood (in Russian, 2008), and Non-Canonical Classic: Dmitri A. Prigov (in Russian, 2010). His works have been nominated for Russian Little Booker Prize (1997) and shortlisted for the Andrey Bely Prize (2008). From 2009–12, Lipovetsky served on the jury for Russian Literary Prize NOS (2011–12 as chair).
Maria Litovskaya is professor of Russian literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries at the Ural Federal University. She is the author of books on Valentin Kataev ( Feniks poet pered solntsem: Fenomen Valentina Kataeva , 1999), on contemporary mass literature (co-authored, 2009), and has written numerous articles on the history of Russian literature of the twentieth century. She has edited volumes of articles on Russian women ( Russkaia zhenshchina , 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001); on ‘Boys and Girls: realities of socialisation’ (2004), as well as an almanac on children’s literature ( Detskie chteniia , 2012) and textbooks on literature.
Stephen M. Norris is professor of History at Miami University (OH), where he is also a faculty associate at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies. His teaching and research interests are in modern Russian history, with a focus on visual culture since 1800. His first book, A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812 – 1945 (2006), examines the lubok and how it served as an important medium for articulating Russian nationhood. His second book, Blockbuster History in the New Russia: Movies, Memory, and Patriotism (2012), traces a similar story after communism, arguing that recent Russian historical films sparked a revival of nationalist and patriotic sentiments. Norris is also the co-editor of three books: P