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In her study of key radio dramas broadcast from 1930 to 1943, Lauren Rea analyses the work of leading exponents of the genre against the wider backdrop of nation-building, intellectual movements and popular culture in Argentina. During the period that has come to be known as the infamous decade, radio serials drew on the Argentine literary canon, with writers such as Héctor Pedro Blomberg and José Andrés González Pulido contributing to the nation-building project as they reinterpreted nineteenth-century Argentina and repackaged it for a 1930s mass audience. Thus, a historical romance set in the tumultuous dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas reveals the conflict between the message trans...
Pushkin's palaces or Dostoevsky's slums? Many a modern-day visitor to St. Petersburg has one or, more likely, both of these images in mind when setting foot in this stage set-like setting for some of the world's most treasured literary masterpieces. What they overlook is the vast uncharted territory in between. In Mapping St. Petersburg, Julie Buckler traces the evolution of Russia's onetime capital from a "conceptual hierarchy" to a living cultural system--a topography expressed not only by the city's physical structures but also by the literary texts that have helped create it. By favoring noncanonical works and "underdescribed spaces," Buckler seeks to revise the literary monumentalizatio...
Ranging widely across time and geography, Rites of Place is to date the most comprehensive and diverse example of memory studies in the field of Russian and East European studies. Leading scholars consider how public rituals and the commemoration of historically significant sites facilitate a sense of community, shape cultural identity, and promote political ideologies. The aims of this volume take on unique importance in the context of the tumultuous events that have marked Eastern European history—especially the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, World War II, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. With essays on topics such as the founding of St. Petersburg, the battle of Borodino, the Katyn massacre, and the Lenin cult, this volume offers a rich discussion of the uses and abuses of memory in cultures where national identity has repeatedly undergone dramatic shifts and remains riven by internal contradictions.
The second edition of the Diary of a Writer (1876-1877) marked a crucial point in Dostoevskii's literary career. In spite of critics' attacks, many ordinary readers were overwhelmed by Dostoevskii's charisma and began writing to him from different parts of Russia, expressing their views of the moral, social and political issues dealt with in the Diary. Such success was guaranteed also by the original rhetorical style of the Diary of a Writer, which aimed to involve readers and persuade them to share Dostoevskii's beliefs. By concentrating on new material, consisting of correspondence between Dostoevskii and his readers, and applying a new methodology, reader-response criticism and genre studies, the author investigates how Dostoevskii's rhetoric in the Diary of a Writer affected the Russian reading public, transformed Dostoevskii's image in Russian society, and reawakened national identity.
Focusing on a number of historical and literary personalities who were regarded with disdain in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution—figures such as Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Mikhail Lermontov—Epic Revisionism tells the fascinating story of these individuals’ return to canonical status during the darkest days of the Stalin era. An inherently interdisciplinary project, Epic Revisionism features pieces on literary and cultural history, film, opera, and theater. This volume pairs scholarly essays with selections drawn from Stalin-era primary sources—newspaper articles, unpublished archival documents, short stories—to provide students and specialists with the richest possible understanding of this understudied phenomenon in modern Russian history. “These scholars shed a great deal of light not only on Stalinist culture but on the politics of cultural production under the Soviet system.”—David L. Hoffmann, Slavic Review
In this comprehensive account of censorship of the visual arts in nineteenth-century Europe, when imagery was accessible to the illiterate in ways that print was not, specialists in the history of the major European countries trace the use of censorship by the authorities to implement their fears of the visual arts, from caricature to cinema.
This book traces the impact on Jewish culture in Western Europe of the migration of Russian Jews following the 1917 Revolution as they enabled the creation of a single sphere of Jewish culture common to all parts of the European diaspora.
“Science” and “Religion” have been two major elements in the building of modern nation-states. While contemporary historiography of science has studied the interactions between nation building and the construction of modern scientific and technological institutions, “science-and-religion” is still largely based on a supposed universal historiography in which global notions of “science” and of “religion” are seldom challenged. This book explores the interface between science, religion and nationalism at a local level, paying attention to the roles religious institutions, specific confessional traditions, or an undefined notion of “religion” played in the construction o...
Russian Archaism considers the aesthetic quest of Russian modernism in relation to the nation-building ideas that spread in the late imperial period. Irina Shevelenko argues that the cultural milieu in Russia, where the modernist movement began as an extension of Western trends at the end of the nineteenth century, soon became captivated by nationalist indoctrination. Members of artistic groups, critics, and theorists advanced new interpretations of the goals of aesthetic experimentation that would allow them to embed the nation-building agenda within the aesthetic one. Shevelenko's book focuses on the period from the formation of the World of Art group (1898) through the Great War and encom...
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.