Russian Culture

Culture and Customs of Russia is a splendid introduction to the largest country in the world. This timely volume gives the scope of the country from earliest history to the breakup of the Soviet Union and beyond. Students and a general audience will learn about the land, history, thought and religion, social customs, marriage and family, education, cuisine, fashion, literature, media, film, the arts, and architecture. The authoritative breadth of coverage, accessibility, and engaging writing style are truly outstanding.

This work offers an account of the relationship between literature and other cultural forms in late imperial Russia and revolutionary Russia.

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.

This collection of essays by leading western and Russian specialists contains new insights and updates previous research into the role of women in Russian culture in the 19th and 20th centuries.

How could the West have better prepared for the fall of communism and gained a clearer picture of Russia's new political landscape? By cultivating an awareness, Nicolai Petro argues, of the deep democratic aspirations of the Russian people since Muscovite times. Petro traces the long history of those aspirations, recovering for us an understanding crucial to our formation of successful foreign policy toward Russia. Petro's analysis includes many surprising and incisive observations. In a look at the Russian Orthodox Church, he details its long history of support for opposition sentiment during both Tsarist and Soviet times and its support for democracy today. He also explores the character and power of contemporary Russian nationalism and traces its origins to the neo-Slavophile national identity that took its shape as a challenge to Bolshevik oppression. Delineating Russia's postcommunist political parties, the author reveals their roots in prerevolutionary times and explains how this continuitymakes Russian political aspirations far more predictable than is commonly assumed. Awakening us to Russia's historical involvement in the democratic quest that lies at the heart of Western values, Petro opens a path for a more meaningful, more productive, understanding of modern Russia.

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.