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Kathleen Parth offers the first comprehensive examination of the controversial literary movement Russian Village Prose. From the 1950s to the decline of the movement in the 1970s, Valentin Rasputin, Fedor Abramov, and other writers drew on "luminous" memories of their rural childhoods to evoke a thousand-year-old pattern of life that was disappearing as they wrote. In their lyrical descriptions of a vanishing world, they expressed nostalgia for Russia's past and fears for the nation's future; they opposed collectivized agriculture, and fought to preserve traditional art and architecture and to protect the environment. Assessing the place of Village Prose in the newly revised canon of twentie...
This book traces the origins and activities of an alliance of conservative Communist Party authorities and Russian nationalists during the late Soviet era. Specifically, it examines how and to what extent hitherto orthodox Communists sought political allies in the Russian nationalist movement in order to garner support for halting the reform program and saving the Soviet state from collapse.
The epidemic of mass rape in the former Yugoslavia has illustrated once again, and in particularly brutal fashion, the inextricable relationship between national politics, sexual politics, and body politics. The nexus of these three forces is highly charged in any culture, at any time in history, but especially so among cultures in which rapid, even cataclysmic, changes in material realities and national self-conceptions are eroding or overwhelming previously secure boundaries. The postcommunist moment in the so-called Second World--Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union--has dramatically exposed the opportunities and dangers that arise when the political, cultural, and econo...
Poetry has long dominated the cultural landscape of modern Iraq, simultaneously representing the literary pinnacle of high culture and giving voice to the popular discourses of mass culture. As the favored genre of culture expression for religious clerics, nationalist politicians, leftist dissidents, and avant-garde intellectuals, poetry critically shaped the social, political, and cultural debates that consumed the Iraqi public sphere in the twentieth century. The popularity of poetry in modern Iraq, however, made it a dangerous practice that carried serious political consequences and grave risks to dissident poets. The Dangers of Poetry is the first book to narrate the social history of po...
This essay anthology explores the intersection of gender, food and culture in post-1960s Soviet life from personal cookbooks to gulag survival. Seasoned Socialism considers the relationship between gender and food in late Soviet daily life, specifically between 1964 and 1985. Political and economic conditions heavily influenced Soviet life and foodways during this period and an exploration of Soviet women’s central role in the daily sustenance for their families as well as the obstacles they faced on this quest offers new insights into intergenerational and inter-gender power dynamics of that time. Seasoned Socialism considers gender construction and performance across a wide array of primary sources, including poetry, fiction, film, women’s journals, oral histories, and interviews. This collection provides fresh insight into how the Soviet government sought to influence both what citizens ate and how they thought about food.
This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of Turkish literature within both a local and global context. Across eight thematic sections a collection of subject experts use close readings of literature materials to provide a critical survey of the main issues and topics within the literature. The chapters provide analysis on a wide range of genres and text types, including novels, poetry, religious texts, and drama, with works studied ranging from the fourteenth century right up to the present day. Using such a historic scope allows the volume to be read across cultures and time, while simultaneously contextualizing and investigating how modern Turkish literature interacts with world lit...
Nations, Identities, Cultures. Three apparently transparent concepts. But are they really transparent? In 1993, I decided to face them and organized a semester-long international seminar that focused on these concepts and their relation to exile, to the ethnicization of the political, and to the recess of the social in our contemporary world.
The legendary Russian biography series, The Lives of Remarkable People, has played a significant role in Russian culture from its inception in 1890 until today. The longest running biography series in world literature, it spans three centuries and widely divergent political and cultural epochs: Imperial, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Russia. The authors argue that the treatment of biographical figures in the series is a case study for continuities and changes in Russian national identity over time. Biography in Russia and elsewhere remains a most influential literary genre and the distinctive approach and branding of the series has made it the economic engine of its publisher, Molodaia gvardiia. T...
This unique work will be of great interest to those engaged in politics and Russian studies, as well as professionals dealing with Russia.
This book is based on the premise that the foreign policy of any country is heavily influenced by a society's evolving notions of itself. Applying his analysis to Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, the author argues that national identity is an ever-changing concept, influenced by internal and external events, and by the manipulation of a polity's collective memory. The interaction of the narrative of a society and its foreign policy is therefore paramount. This is especially the case in East-Central Europe, where political institutions are weak, and social coherence remains subject to the vagaries of the concept of nationhood. Ilya Prizel's study will be of interest to students of nationalism, as well as of foreign policy and politics in East-Central Europe.