Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons^™

Psychological Culture: Ambivalence And Resistance To Social Change, Alexander Etkind

Russian Culture

"National character," "modal personality," "collective unconscious," "ethnic mentality," "cultural identity" -- these and similar notions are designed to capture psychological traits that distinguish one social group from another. Attempts to isolate such hypothetical qualities are not different in principle from efforts to describe religious, legal, or other social patterns found among people who have lived together for a length of time, except that psychological constructs tend to focus on subjective characteristics and are somewhat harder to identify. For the first time, the link between culture and psychology came under close scrutiny in the nineteen century. German linguists Steinthal and Lazarus …

Intellectual Culture: The End Of Russian Intelligentsia, Dmitri N. Shalin

Russian Culture

No group cheered louder for Soviet reform, had a bigger stake in perestroika, and suffered more in its aftermath than did the Russian intelligentsia. Today, nearly a decade after Mikhail Gorbachev unveiled his plan to reform Soviet society, the mood among Russian intellectuals is decidedly gloomy. "The intelligentsia has carried perestroika on its shoulders," laments Ury Shchekochikhin, "so why does it feel so forlorn, superfluous, forgotten"? G. Ivanitsky warns that the intellectual strata "has become so thin that in three or four years the current genocide against the intelligentsia would surely wipe it out." Andrey Bitov, one of the country's …

Religious Culture: Faith In Soviet And Post-Soviet Russia, Jerry Pankhurst

Russian Culture

The former Soviet Union is undergoing a religious revival. People inside and outside the Russian Orthodox church are reexamining its ancient ways, rediscovering its long-forgotten saints, searching its institutional memory for answers to urgent questions facing the nation. The Western reaction to this remarkable resurgence of religion in Russia has been mixed. All observers welcome the fact that free inquiry about religion and free religious worship have been restored in the Russian Federation. At the same time, many are concerned about the xenophobic tendencies that have accompanied the religious revival in Russia and that became especially evident after the liberal …

Soviet Everyday Culture: An Oxymoron?, Svetlana Boym

Russian Culture

Mikhail Mishin, a Soviet satirist, wrote that Russians recognize themselves in the famous fairy-tale character Ivan the Fool. He bides his time napping on the heated furnace and gets up only to undertake major heroic feats. Ivan the Fool might be a great hero, but he has no idea how to survive his everyday life. Everyday life, captured in the Russian word byt, is a more dangerous enemy to him than the multi-headed fire-spitting dragon. The everyday is Russia 's cultural monster. The nation might worship its heroes and their fabled ability to withstand hell or high water, but …

Literary Culture: "New Soviet Man" In The Mirror Of Literature, Maurice Friedberg

Russian Culture

The roots of Soviet literary culture extend beyond the establishment of the Soviet state itself. Maxim Gorky's Mother written, ironically, some years before the Bolshevik Revolution in the United States (the country, it might be noted, that also contributed to the cause of the tradition of May Day observances) is one hallmark of that culture avant la lettre. Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done, a novel often cited in Communist hagiographies as the inspiration of generations of nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries (including, significantly, the founder of Soviet state himself, as well as his martyred brother) is another. And yet, we …

Artistic Culture: The Trial By Freedom, Daniil Dondurei

Russian Culture

"The poet in Russia is more than just a poet." This line from Evgeny Yevtushenko's verse hints at the unique place that artistic culture has occupied in Russia 's tragic history. From Radishchev and Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn and Tarkovsky, writers, painters, film makers -- cultural producers of every kind -- undertook to explain Russian society to itself. The common view that depicts Soviet art as subservient to ideology is well grounded in facts, but it tends to conceal as much as it reveals. Soviet artists served the state, and thus could not help but being influenced by the nation's poisonous …

Labor Culture: Labor Morality Under Socialism, Vladimir Magun

Russian Culture

Soviet leaders had always taken a keen interest in workers' behavior and labor motives and sought to keep labor morality under strict state control. A complex network of values and regulations was developed for this purpose after the October Revolution of 1917. They were best articulated in the "political economy of socialism" which purported to present a scientific picture of the country's economic life. Textbooks on socialist economy were widely circulated in the Soviet Union and appropriate courses included into a core curriculum for all higher education institutions in the country. Basic tenets of socialist political economy were taught in …

The Intelligentsia Without Revolution: The Culture Of The Silver Age, Andrei Ariev

Russian Culture

The most effective definition of "the intelligentsia" might read: “Russian intellectuals who are generally opposed to the government.” But even Russia’s traditionally powerful government has collapsed at times, leaving a vacuum of authority. This was precisely the historical situation at the beginning of the twentieth century. It made an indelible impression both upon thinkers, such as Rozanov, and on politicians, such as Lenin.

The Art Of Criticism? Criticism As Art!, Natalia Ivanova

Russian Culture

The study of Russian-Soviet and post-Soviet literary criticism in the second half of the twentieth century (henceforth denoted in the text as RLC) has been largely based on the chronological principle.

By way of introduction, I will begin with a brief overview of the RLC phenomenon-its origins, fundamental characteristics, and processes of change.

Colonizing Chaos: Russian Literature At The End Of The Twentieth Century, Alexander Genis

Russian Culture

Culture sets the parameters of our reality, defines its boundaries, gives each of us a system of values and reference points and, most important, provides our subconscious with the materials necessary for an awareness of chaos and the universe, space and time, cause and effect. Beginning my essay with these broadest categories, I will attempt to sketch the coordinates of that landscape in which the stormy drama of post-Soviet literature is played out. This will be followed by an analysis of the literary situation in the period directly preceding our own. Coming next will be some brief sketches of nine …

Rethinking The Canon: Nonconformist Soviet Classics In Post-Soviet Perspective, Alexander Zholkovsky

Russian Culture

In the four-plus decades since Stalin's death, the Soviet literary canon has undergone a series of changes. Thus, Fedor Dostoyevsky, Konstantin Leontiev, and Apollon Grigoriev, seen in all their complexity, gradually resumed their pride of place in nineteenth-century literary history, while Gogol was allowed to be more of a conservative thinker and modernist stylist than during the period of High Stalinism. Twentieth-century literature welcomed back the early Vladimir Maiakovsky, then all of Aleksandr Blok (previously represented in the Soviet canon only by his The Twelve), and finally the entire Silver Age. The list of writers now rehabilitated, republished, and "recognized" …

The Aesthetic Code Of Russian Postmodernism, Mark Lipovetsky

Russian Culture

Postmodernist discourse has become central to literary criticism in the 1990s. Unlike many other literary discourses, it was never formally announced, yet beginning in the late 1980s (with Mikhail Epstein’s articles) it took over almost all literary publications and effectively led to a new polarization of literary forces. If, during the first years of Perestroika, literary and cultural factions were divided primarily along political lines, with Western liberal sympathizers and anti-Communists on one side, and nationalist defenders of Communism on the other, then by the middle of the 1990s debate about postmodernism had split the liberals into those who sided …

Russian Literature In The Christian Context, Boris Paramonov

Russian Culture

In examining Russia’s cultural history one encounters an incontestable fact: the literary nature of its spirituality. At the same time, Russian literature is distinguished by its high caliber. If one examines Russia’s cultural significance in the context of the Western world, or generally attempts to evaluate the nation’s achievements on a Western European scale, one finds that Russian literature stands out with particular distinction. The West places Leo Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky on a par with Shakespeare, while Chekhov’s plays enjoy a popularity comparable with the Bard’s in the sheer number of theatrical performances, even in England, where Chekhov’s Western renown …

Russian Art In The Second Half Of The Twentieth Century, Ekaterina Dyogot

Russian Culture

This essay concerns Russian art in the second half of the twentieth century, yet any such description requires constant reference to the Russian avant-garde and the Soviet art system. The country's isolation made Soviet art such a specific, aesthetic, and particularly institutional phenomenon that it becomes critical to any understanding of art in the post-Stalinist period.

The Russian Cinematic Culture, Oksana Bulgakova

Russian Culture

The cinema has always been subject to keen scrutiny by Russia's rulers. As early as the beginning of this century Russia's last czar, Nikolai Romanov, attempted to nationalize this new and, in his view, threatening medium: "I have always insisted that these cinema-booths are dangerous institutions. Any number of bandits could commit God knows what crimes there, yet they say the people go in droves to watch all kinds of rubbish; I don't know what to do about these places." The plan for a government monopoly over cinema, which would ensure control of production and consumption and thereby protect the …

Russian Architecture Between Anorexia And Bulimia, Vladimir Paperny

Russian Culture

The Russian visual sensibilities (if there is such thing) are formed by two contrasting influences. On the one hand, there is a natural attraction to decorative surfaces, to richness of colors and shapes. Historians tell us that in the 10 th century Prince Vladimir decided to convert to Christianity mainly because of the visual experience his emissaries had had in Constantinople: “The Greeks led us to the building where they worship their God,” they wrote to the Prince, “and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such …

The Art Of Dissent: Parody, Travesty And Irony In Late Soviet Culture, Dmitri N. Shalin

Russian Culture

Irony is the favorite tool of Russian postmodernists fighting discourse totalitarianism. They wield it like a crowbar to pry open in the simulacrum, to tear down the Potemkin portable villages built by forced discursive labor. Every new blow the ironist strikes against the official reality reaffirms his intonational freedom amidst the most coercive discourse. An ultimate weapon of the spiritual proletariat, irony proves to the intellectual that he is a subject rather than an object of discourse. Alas, ironic vigil takes its toll. The self busily disclaiming identity with itself loses track of what it really is. It knows not …

Beyond Practice And Constraint: Toward Situating Female Sexual Agency On St. Croix, Usvi, Jamae F. Morris

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Women are shaped by the social structure, but they are not simply passive products. They act. They respond. They pursue. This holds true for many aspects of women's complex and dynamic lives, including their sexual health. Daily, women negotiate social expectations, individual proclivities and desires, and the need to provide for themselves and their families. Through the use of ethnographic methodology, focusing on three major social pillars--the regulation of the female body, the organization of social space, and the structuring of gender--this investigation, based on the island of St. Croix, USVI, seeks to offer an ethnographic assessment of women's attempts …

Painting Puertorriqueñidad: The Jíbaro As A Symbol Of Creole Nationalism In Puerto Rican Art Before And After 1898, Jeffrey L. Boe

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the three decades surrounding the Spanish-American war (1880-1910), three prominent Puerto Rican artists, Francisco Oller (1833-1917), Manuel E. Jordan (1853-1919), and Ramón Frade (1875-1954) created a group of paintings depicting "el jíbaro," the rural Puerto Rican farm worker, in a way that can be appropriately labeled "nationalistic." Using a set of motifs involving clothes, customs, domestic architecture and agricultural practices unique to rural Puerto Rico, they contributed to the imagination of a communal identity for creoles at the turn of the century. ("Creole" here refers to individuals of Spanish heritage, born on the island of Puerto Rico.) …

Barcelona's Public Market System: Bridging The Gap Between The Global And The Local, Larissa Hernandez

Master's Theses

The unique public markets of Barcelona are poised for a thriving future based on their theoretical and empirical grounding and commitment to both global influences as well as the local traditions of trade and consumption. This global/local balance keeps the markets relevant to contemporary consumers and allows them to have a well-rounded experience as they shop. In this paper, I trace the history and previous incarnations of public markets through the Greeks, Romans and Arabs, as well as consider the European situation and its fluctuations over the centuries. I then uncover the debate surrounding globalization, its influence on the food …