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"Swift captures the habits, inclinations, tastes, and uses of leisure time among Tsarist Russia's urban lower classes--in all their colorful complexity. He vividly presents the kaleidoscopic world of popular theater, where culture meets entertainment, where Shakespeare and Ostrovsky meet racy ...

"Swift captures the habits, inclinations, tastes, and uses of leisure time among Tsarist Russia's urban lower classes--in all their colorful complexity. He vividly presents the kaleidoscopic world of popular theater, where culture meets entertainment, where Shakespeare and Ostrovsky meet racy vaudeville, farce, and melodrama, and where social and cultural identities blur. His study is a carefully analyzed, superbly documented, and immensely readable exposition of how "popular culture" really worked in prerevolutionary Russia, and how the tastes of its consumers constantly stymied and conflicted with the visions of state, educated society, and radicals alike."--Richard Stites, Georgetown University

"The fullest and most interesting account of how the Russian public seized upon the theater as an art form, as entertainment, and as an instrument of popular education. Swift makes Ostrovsky, Stanislavsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy come alive, bringing great clarity to the larger context in which Russia's great dramatists thought about theater, its audience, and its functions."--Jeffrey Brooks, author of "When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917"

"In this stimulating book, Anthony Swift shows how popular theater became a forum where all the weighty questions of Russia's future were discussed: Who were the Russian people, how should they be governed, and what should they believe?"--Lynn Mally, author of "Revolutionary Acts: Amateur Theater and the Soviet State

With the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s, the Russian social landscape has undergone its most dramatic changes since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, turning the once bland & monolithic state-run marketplace into a virtual maze of specialty shops-from sushi bars to discotheques & ...

With the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s, the Russian social landscape has undergone its most dramatic changes since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, turning the once bland & monolithic state-run marketplace into a virtual maze of specialty shops-from sushi bars to discotheques & tattoo parlors. In Consuming Russia editor Adele Marie Barker presents the first book-length volume to explore the sweeping cultural transformation taking place in the new Russia. The contributors offer a portrait of how the people of Russia reconcile prerevolutionary elite culture-as well as the Communist legacy-with the influx of popular influences from the West to build a society that no longer relies on a single dominant discourse & embraces the multiplicities of both public & private Russian life. Fusing theoretical analysis with ethnographic research to examine the rise of popular culture, Barker brings together Russian & American scholars from anthropology, history, literature, political science, sociology, & cultural studies. These experts cover topics as varied as post-Soviet rave culture, rock music, children & advertising, pyramid schemes, tattooing, pets, & spectator sports. They examine detective novels, anecdotes, issues of feminism & queer sexuality, nostalgia, the Russian cinema, & graffiti. Discussions of pornography, religious cults, & the deployment of Soviet ideological symbols as post-Soviet kitsch also help to demonstrate how the rebuilding of Russia's political & economic infrastructure has been influenced by its citizens' cultural production & consumption. This volume will appeal to those engaged with post-Soviet studies, to anyone interested in the state of Russian society, & to readers more generally involved with the study of popular culture.

War is always far more than just a military event, and the cultural effects of world war are massive. The Great War suffused Russian culture to an extraordinary degree. In this heavily illustrated book, Hubertus Jahn explores a variety of ways in which Russians expressed their patriotic fervor. He ...

War is always far more than just a military event, and the cultural effects of world war are massive. The Great War suffused Russian culture to an extraordinary degree. In this heavily illustrated book, Hubertus Jahn explores a variety of ways in which Russians expressed their patriotic fervor. He assembles little-known evidence from diverse sources - postcards and fairground peepshows, operettas and circuses, posters and movies - to illuminate the cultural life of the nation in the last years of the tsar. Patriotism invaded the world of entertainment and popular culture during World War I, shaping the imagination of Russians of all classes and changing with the fortunes of the nation at war. Between 1914 and 1917 cartoons of a bewhiskered kaiser gave way to caricatures of greedy speculators; the exploits of Cossack heroes faded into sentimental images of heroic nurses tending to wounded soldiers; and sensationalist movies offered an increasingly popular escape from the disasters of the eastern front. Jahn correlates these metaphoric shifts with changes in the way the Russians understood their nation; the revolutions of 1917 reflected not only social and political cleavages but also, he suggests, a crisis of national identity.

The popular culture of urban and rural tsarist Russia revealed a dynamic and troubled world. Stephen Frank and Mark Steinberg have gathered here a diverse collection of essays by Western and Russian scholars who question conventional interpretations and recall neglected stories about popular ...

The popular culture of urban and rural tsarist Russia revealed a dynamic and troubled world. Stephen Frank and Mark Steinberg have gathered here a diverse collection of essays by Western and Russian scholars who question conventional interpretations and recall neglected stories about popular behavior, politics, and culture. What emerges is a new picture of lower-class life, in which traditions and innovations intermingled and social boundaries and identities were battered and reconstructed.

The authors vividly convey the vitality as well as the contradictions of social life in old regime Russia, while also confronting problems of interpretation, methodology, and cultural theory. They tell of peasant death rites and religious beliefs, family relationships and brutalities, defiant peasant women, folk songs, urban amusement parks, expressions of popular patriotism, the penny press, workers' notions of the self, street hooliganism, and attempts by educated Russians to transform popular festivities. Together, the authors portray popular culture not as a static, separate world, but as the dynamic means through which lower-class Russians e