This volume examines areas of cultural production that have offered Russian women new freedoms and have opened commercial and artistic possibilities to them since the 19th century. Key aspects of Russian culture that have been systematically ignored are foregrounded here: Russian women s development of "popular" culture and their ingenious reinventions of "high" literature. The essays analyze women s creativity of every type their products, performances, and collaborative exchanges in sites that range from the bath-house to the ballroom.

Contributors are Nadezhda Azhgikhina, Lina...

For more than three centuries, St. Petersburg, founded in 1703 by Peter the Great as Russia's westward-oriented capital and as a visually stunning showcase of Russia's imperial ambitions, has been the country's most mythologized city. Like a museum piece, it has functioned as a site for preservation, a literal and imaginative place where Russians can commune with idealized pasts. Preserving Petersburg represents a significant departure from traditional representations. By moving beyond the "Petersburg text" created by canonized writers and artists, the contributors to this engrossing...

This wide-ranging collection investigates the father/son dynamic in post-Stalinist Soviet cinema and its Russian successor. Contributors analyze complex patterns of identification, disavowal, and displacement in films by such diverse directors as Khutsiev, Motyl', Tarkovsky, Balabanov, Sokurov, Todorovskii, Mashkov, and Bekmambetov. Several chapters focus on the difficulties of fulfilling the paternal function, while others show how vertical and horizontal male bonds are repeatedly strained by the pressure of redefining an embattled masculinity in a shifting political landscape.