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This anthology offers a rich array of documents, short fiction, poems, songs, plays, movie scripts, comic routines, and folklore to offer a close look at the mass culture that was consumed by millions in Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1953. Both state-sponsored cultural forms and the unofficial culture that flourished beneath the surface are represented. The focus is on the entertainment genres that both shaped and reflected the social, political, and personal values of the regime and the masses. The period covered encompasses the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the mixed economy and culture of the 1920s, the tightly controlled Stalinist 1930s, the looser atmosphere of the Great Patriotic War, and the postwar era ending with the death of Stalin. Much of the material appears here in English for the first time. A companion 45-minute audio tape (ISBN 0-253-32911-6) features contemporaneous performances of fifteen popular songs of the time, with such favorites as "Bublichki," "The Blue Kerchief," and "Katyusha." Russian texts of the songs are included in the book.
Companion disc features recordings of popular songs and vaudeville skits performed by some of Russia's most famous singers and comics of early twentieth century.
In the early years of the USSR, socialist festivals--events entailing enormous expense and the deployment of thousands of people--were inaugurated by the Bolsheviks. Avant-garde canvases decorated the streets, workers marched, and elaborate mass spectacles were staged. Why, with a civil war raging and an economy in ruins, did the regime sponsor such spectacles? In this first comprehensive investigation of the way festivals helped build a new political culture, James von Geldern examines the mass spectacles that captured the Bolsheviks' historical vision. Spectacle directors borrowed from a tradition that included tsarist pomp, avant-garde theater, and popular celebrations. They transformed t...
An authoritative history of Russia from early Rus' to the reign of Peter the Great.
Offers an array of documents, short fiction, poems, songs, plays, movie scripts, and folklore to offer a look at the mass culture that was consumed by millions in Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1953. This work focuses on the entertainment genres that both shaped and reflected the social, political, and personal values of the regime and the masses.
In Russian history, the twentieth century was an era of unprecedented, radical transformations - changes in social systems, political regimes, and economic structures. A number of distinctive literary schools emerged, each with their own voice, specific artistic character, and ideological background. As a single-volume compendium, the Companion provides a new perspective on Russian literary and cultural development, as it unifies both émigré literature and literature written in Russia. This volume concentrates on broad, complex, and diverse sources - from symbolism and revolutionary avant-garde writings to Stalinist, post-Stalinist, and post-Soviet prose, poetry, drama, and émigré literature, with forays into film, theatre, and literary policies, institutions and theories. The contributors present recent scholarship on historical and cultural contexts of twentieth-century literary development, and situate the most influential individual authors within these contexts, including Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Bulgakov and Anna Akhmatova.
"This lively and often moving collection of essays is an important contribution to Western scholarship on Soviet society and culture during the Second World War. . . . [a] straightforward but lively description of cultural life, unhampered by excessive interpretation or cultural theory. For all those who love Russia's cultural heritage, these essays cast a welcome spotlight on some of the people and pockets of life from that tragic but compelling time." —Canadian Slavonic Papers "Enjoyable to read and accessible to the nonspecialist, Culture and Entertainment is not only an indispensable addition to any Soviet studies library but will prove valuable to anyone interested in or teaching cour...
A timely study of the "new Russia" at the end of the twentieth century.
An examination of political, social and cultural developments in the Soviet Union. The book identifies the social tensions and political inconsistencies that spurred radical change in the government of Russia, from the turn of the century to the revolution of 1917. Kenez envisions that revolution as a crisis of authority that posed the question, 'Who shall govern Russia?' This question was resolved with the creation of the Soviet Union. Kenez traces the development of the Soviet Union from the Revolution, through the 1920s, the years of the New Economic Policies and into the Stalinist order. He shows how post-Stalin Soviet leaders struggled to find ways to rule the country without using Stalin's methods but also without openly repudiating the past, and to negotiate a peaceful but antipathetic coexistence with the capitalist West. In this second edition, he also examines the post-Soviet period, tracing Russia's development up to the time of publication.
During the 1930s, Stalin and his entourage rehabilitated famous names from the Russian national past in a propaganda campaign designed to mobilize Soviet society for the coming war. In a provocative study, David Brandenberger traces this populist "national Bolshevism" into the 1950s, highlighting the catalytic effect that it had on Russian national identity formation.