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The National Bolshevik Party, founded in the mid-1990s by Eduard Limonov and Aleksandr Dugin, began as an attempt to combine radically different ideologies. In the years that followed, Limonov, Dugin, and the movements they led underwent dramatic shifts. The two leaders eventually became political adversaries, with Dugin and his organizations strongly supporting Putin’s regime while Limonov and his groups became part of the liberal opposition. To illuminate the role of these right-wing ideas in contemporary Russian society, Fabrizio Fenghi examines the public pronouncements and aesthetics of this influential movement. He analyzes a diverse range of media, including novels, art exhibitions, performances, seminars, punk rock concerts, and even protest actions. His interviews with key figures reveal an attempt to create an alternative intellectual class, or a “counter-intelligensia.” This volume shows how certain forms of art can transform into political action through the creation of new languages, institutions, and modes of collective participation.
Today's Russia, Unstuck in Time suggests, is a nation of time travelers, living either in memories of the Great Patriotic War and a society that provided for all its citizens or in an alternative future in which the USSR never collapsed. Eliot Borenstein examines the ways in which films, fiction, television, social media, political parties, and even theme parks use the conventions of time travel and alternate history to fantasize about narratives that are more appealing than the post-Soviet present. Unstuck in Time explores the centrality of an uncannily persistent USSR in the post-Soviet cultural imagination through deeply engaged and entertaining readings of an impressive array of texts: fantasies in which characters time-crash into the Soviet past, fictions of triumphant far-future Soviet societies, and real-life enterprises feeding the belief that the Soviet Union never ended. Whether channeled into benign nostalgia or dangerous mythmaking, the cases that Borenstein analyzes reveal the extent to which the psychic shock of the end of the Soviet Union left Russians adrift, caught between a past many still long for and a future few can imagine.
Explores the emergence of a new womanhood in turn-of-the-century Vienna. In Embodied Histories, historian Katya Motyl explores the everyday acts of defiance that formed the basis for new, unconventional forms of womanhood in early twentieth-century Vienna. The figures Motyl brings back to life defied gender conformity, dressed in new ways, behaved brashly, and expressed themselves freely, overturning assumptions about what it meant to exist as a woman. Motyl delves into how these women inhabited and reshaped the urban landscape of Vienna, an increasingly modern, cosmopolitan city. Specifically, she focuses on the ways that easily overlooked quotidian practices such as loitering outside cafés and wandering through city streets helped create novel conceptions of gender. Exploring the emergence of a new womanhood, Embodied Histories presents a new account of how gender, the body, and the city merge with and transform each other, showing how our modes of being are radically intertwined with the spaces we inhabit.
Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity––and the ultimate boundary transgression. Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a ch...
Although understudied in the West, Iurii Trifonov was a canonical Soviet author whose lifetime spanned nearly the whole of the USSR's history and who embodied many of its contradictions. The son of a Bolshevik murdered on Stalin's orders, he wrote his first novel in praise of the dictator's policies. A lifelong Muscovite, he often set his prose in the Central Asian peripheries of the USSR's empire. A subtle critic of the communist regime, he nonetheless benefited from privileges doled out by a censorious state. Scholars have both neglected Trifonov in recent years and focused their limited attention on the author's most famous works, produced in the 1960s through 1980s. Yet almost half of hi...
Border Conditions combines history and memory studies with literary and cultural studies to examine lives at the limits of contemporary Europe: Russian speakers living in Latvia. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, Latvia's Russian speakers have balanced between Russia and Europe as well as a socialist past, a capitalist and liberal present, and an illiberal regime rising in the Russian Federation. Kevin M. F. Platt describes how members of this population have defined themselves through art, literature, cultural institutions, film, and music—and how others have sought to define them. At the end of the Cold War, many anticipated that societies globally could agree on the meaning of past history and a just politics in the present. The view from the borders of Europe demonstrates the contradictions pertaining to terms like empire, state socialism, liberalism, and nation that have made it impossible to achieve a consensus. In refocusing the examination of state socialism's aftermath around questions of empire and postcolonialism, Border Conditions helps us understand the distinctions between Russian and Western worldviews driving military confrontation to this day.
An international team of leading experts provide the first comprehensive account of post-Soviet Russian literature.
This collection offers a variety of scholarly views on illustrated books for Soviet children, covering everything from artistic innovation to state propaganda.
Survival, the IISS’s bimonthly journal, challenges conventional wisdom and brings fresh, often controversial, perspectives on strategic issues of the moment. In this issue: · Douglas Barrie and Timothy Wright underscore the need for Washington to prioritise qualitative rather than quantitative improvements to its nuclear capabilities – free to read · Catherine Fieschi examines the implications of an indecisive French election · Daniel Byman and Seth G. Jones explore the increasing ties between China, Russia, Iran and North Korea and obstacles to deeper cooperation · Veronica Anghel and Erik Jones examine how the European Union can utilise its most powerful instrument – enlargement – to stabilise its peripheries · And eight more thought-provoking pieces, as well as our regular Book Reviews and Noteworthy column. Editor: Dr Dana Allin Managing Editor: Jonathan Stevenson Associate Editor: Carolyn West Editorial Assistant: Conor Hodges
Considerado um dos grandes romancistas do século XX, Vassili Grossman transforma o terror da guerra em arte. Stalingrado é o primeiro volume do díptico que se estabeleceu como um dos maiores clássicos mundiais da literatura de guerra. Junto com Vida e destino, é considerado o Guerra e paz do século XX. Em abril de 1942, Hitler e Mussolini se encontram em Salzburgo, onde decidem atacar novamente a União Soviética. A investida logo se intensifica, e o Exército Vermelho é obrigado a regressar ao centro industrial de Stalingrado. Nas ruínas da cidade devastada, as forças soviéticas se preparam para uma última resistência. A trama de Stalingrado se desenrola na Rússia e na Europa,...