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 and monolithic state-run marketplace into a virtual maze of specialty shops—from sushi bars to discotheques and 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 examine 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 and embraces the multiplicities of both public and private Russian life. Barker brings together Russian and American scholars from anthropology, history, literature, political science, sociology, and cultural studies. These experts fuse theoretical analysis with ethnographic research to analyze the rise of popular culture, covering topics as varied as post-Soviet rave culture, rock music, children and advertising, pyramid schemes, tattooing, pets, and spectator sports. They consider detective novels, anecdotes, issues of feminism and queer sexuality, nostalgia, the Russian cinema, and graffiti. Discussions of pornography, religious cults, and the deployment of Soviet ideological symbols as post-Soviet kitsch also help to demonstrate how the rebuilding of Russia’s political and economic infrastructure has been influenced by its citizens’ cultural production and consumption.
This volume will appeal to those engaged with post-Soviet studies, to anyone interested in the state of Russian society, and to readers more generally involved with the study of popular culture.
Contributors. Adele Marie Barker, Eliot Borenstein, Svetlana Boym, John Bushnell, Nancy Condee, Robert Edelman, Laurie Essig, Julia P. Friedman, Paul W. Goldschmidt, Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Anna Krylova, Susan Larsen, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyaschy, Theresa Sabonis-Chafee, Tim Scholl, Adam Weiner, Alexei Yurchak, Elizabeth Kristofovich Zelensky
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Part I: Introduction
- 1. Rereading Russia / Adele Marie Barker
- 2. The Culture Factory: Theorizing the Popular in the Old and New Russia / Adele Marie Barker
- Part II: Popular Culture
- 3. Public Offerings: MMM and the Market of Melodrama / Eliot Borenstein
- 4. Gagarin and the Rave Kids: Transforming Power, Identity, and Aesthetics in Post-Soviet Nightlife / Alexei Yurchak
- 5. Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Holy Rus' and Its Alternatives in Russian Rock Music / Julia P. Friedman and Adam Weiner
- 6. Popular Children's Culture in Post-Perestroika Russia: Songs of Innocence and Experience Revisited / Elizabeth Kristofovich Zelensky
- 7. Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem: Aleksandra Marinina and the Rise of the New Russian Detektiv / Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy
- 8. In Search of an Audience: The New Russian Cinema of Reconciliation / Susan Larsen
- 9. There Are no Rules on Planet Russia: Post-Soviet Spectator Sport / Robert Edelman
- 10. Saying "Lenin" and Meaning "Party": Subversion and Laughter in Soviet and Post-Soviet Society / Anna Krylova
- 11. Going to the Dogs: Pet Life in the New Russia / Adele Marie Barker
- Part III: Sexualities
- 12. Publicly Queer: Representations of Queer Subjects and Subjectivities in the Absence of Identity / Laurie Essig
- 13. Queer Performance: "Male" Ballet / Tim Scholl
- 14. Pornography in Russia / Paul W. Goldschmidt
- Part IV: Society and Social Artifacts
- 15. Body Graphics: Tattooing the Fall of Communism / Nancy Condee
- 16. Communism as Kitsch: Soviet Symbols in Post-Soviet Society / Theresa Sabonis-Chafee
- 17. From the Toilet to the Museum: Memory and Metamorphosis of Soviet Trash / Svetlana Boym
- 18. Paranoid Graffiti at Execution Wall: Nationalist Interpretations of Russia's Travail / John Bushnell
- 19. "Christianity, Antisemitism, Nationalism": Russian Orthodoxy in a Reborn Orthodox Russia / Judith Deutsch Kornblatt
- 20. Suspending Disbelief: "Cults" and Postmodernism in Post-Soviet Russia / Eliot Borenstein
- Contributors
- Index
Text
Audio
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