This wide-ranging cultural history explores the expression of Bolshevik Party ideology through the lens of landscape, or, more broadly, space. Portrayed in visual images and words, the landscape played a vital role in expressing and promoting ideology in the former Soviet Union during the Stalin years, especially in the 1930s. At the time, the iconoclasm of the immediate postrevolutionary years had given way to nation building and a conscious attempt to create a new Soviet "culture." In painting, architecture, literature, cinema, and song, images of landscape were enlisted to help mold the...
This wide-ranging cultural history explores the expression of Bolshevik Party ideology through the lens of landscape, or, more broadly, space. Port...
This wide-ranging cultural history explores the expression of Bolshevik Party ideology through the lens of landscape, or, more broadly, space. Portrayed in visual images and words, the landscape played a vital role in expressing and promoting ideology in the former Soviet Union during the Stalin years, especially in the 1930s. At the time, the iconoclasm of the immediate postrevolutionary years had given way to nation building and a conscious attempt to create a new Soviet "culture." In painting, architecture, literature, cinema, and song, images of landscape were enlisted to help mold the...
This wide-ranging cultural history explores the expression of Bolshevik Party ideology through the lens of landscape, or, more broadly, space. Port...
For decades Stalinist literature, film, and art was almost exclusively deemed political propaganda imposed from on high, devoid of any aesthetic significance. In this book, Evgeny Dobrenko suggests an entirely new view: socialism did not produce Socialist Realism to "prettify reality"; rather, Socialist Realism itself produced socialism by elevating socialism to reality status, giving it material form. Without art, socialism could not have materialized. Bringing together the Soviet historical experience and Stalin-era art-novels, films, poems, songs, painting, photography, architecture, and...
For decades Stalinist literature, film, and art was almost exclusively deemed political propaganda imposed from on high, devoid of any aesthetic signi...
In Soviet culture, the reader was never a "consumer of books" in the Western sense. According to the aesthetic doctrine at the heart of Socialist Realism, the reader was a subject of education, to be reforged and molded. Because of this, Soviet culture cannot be examined properly without taking into account the reading masses. This book is a history of the shaping of the reader of Soviet literature, a history of the "State appropriation of the reader." The entire history of the formation and transformation of the institution of literature in the revolutionary and Soviet eras bears witness to...
In Soviet culture, the reader was never a "consumer of books" in the Western sense. According to the aesthetic doctrine at the heart of Socialist Real...
This book completes the author's study of the sociology of the literary process in Soviet Russia, begun in The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature (Stanford, 1997). The history of the literary process of the Soviet era, understood as the living process of the clash of political and ideological aspirations and the interests and psychology of cultural elites, allows one to understand the social origins and cultural aims of Stalinist art in an entirely new way. Previous scholarship has concentrated largely on Sovietological...
This book completes the author's study of the sociology of the literary process in Soviet Russia, begun in The Making of the State Reader: Social a...
"Socialist Realism without Shores" offers an international perspective on the aesthetics of socialist realism--an aesthetic that, contrary to expectations, survived the death of its originators and the demise of its original domain. This expanded edition of a special issue of the "South Atlantic Quarterly" brings together scholars from various parts of the globe to discuss socialist realism as it appears across genres in art, architecture, film, and literature and across geographic divides--from the "center," Russia, to various points at the "periphery"--China, Germany, France, Poland, remote...
"Socialist Realism without Shores" offers an international perspective on the aesthetics of socialist realism--an aesthetic that, contrary to expectat...
This engrossing book explores the important role played by Stalinist cinema in legitimizing Stalinism and producing a new Soviet identity. Evgeny Dobrenko, a leading scholar of Soviet cultural history, asserts that both Lenin and Stalin valued cinema as the most effective form of propaganda and "organization of the masses." Dobrenko looks at Stalinist historical films and the novels from which they drew and shows that they transformed the experience and trauma of the past into a legitimizing historical narrative--the basis of a new mythology. He examines the works of the great film...
This engrossing book explores the important role played by Stalinist cinema in legitimizing Stalinism and producing a new Soviet identity. Evg...
This book explores how Soviet film worked with time, the past, and memory. It looks at Stalinist cinema and its role in the production of history. Cinema's role in the legitimization of Stalinism and the production of a new Soviet identity was enormous. Both Lenin and Stalin saw in this 'most important of arts' the most effective form of propaganda and 'organisation of the masses'. By examining the works of the greatest Soviet filmmakers of the Stalin era--Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Grigorii Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, Fridrikh Ermler--the author explores the role of the cinema in...
This book explores how Soviet film worked with time, the past, and memory. It looks at Stalinist cinema and its role in the production of history. Cin...
White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov's semi-autobiographical first novel, is the story of the Turbin family in Kiev in 1918. Alexei, Elena, and Nikolka Turbin have just lost their mother--their father had died years before--and find themselves plunged into the chaotic civil war that erupted in the Ukraine in the wake of the Russian Revolution. In the context of this family's personal loss and the social turmoil surrounding them, Bulgakov creates a brilliant picture of the existential crises brought about by the revolution and the loss of social, moral, and political certainties. He confronts...
White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov's semi-autobiographical first novel, is the story of the Turbin family in Kiev in 1918. Alexei, Elena, and Nikolk...
The pursuit of collective happiness was considered a utopian ideal that structured many aspects of Soviet culture, a fact recognized by numerous scholars in various disciplines ranging from cultural and literary studies to sociology and political science. Several groundbreaking studies in the literary and cultural history of the former Soviet Union have changed our understanding of the Soviet past. However, none of these studies has paid attention to an important theme in the cultural history of Soviet society - the pursuit of happiness. Although specialists in Soviet culture repeatedly...
The pursuit of collective happiness was considered a utopian ideal that structured many aspects of Soviet culture, a fact recognized by numerous sc...
