Staging atmospheres: Materiality, culture, and the texture of the in-between

A pioneering history of the experiences of children during Russia's most disrupted century How a country views its children reveals a great deal about that country. This landmark history of childhood in twentieth-century Russia presents an enthralling and detailed picture of a society where childhood was celebrated everywhere but children's real needs were often neglected by the state. Catriona Kelly, one of the foremost cultural historians of modern Russia, explores every aspect of children's lives, including the stresses and joys of ordinary family life, friendships, sports and games, first love, clothing, and schools. She examines the experiences of children in institutions, orphanages, and Stalin's camps, as well as the impact on their lives of such historical tragedies as revolution, civil and world war, and political purges. Based on unprecedented research in archives, hundreds of interviews, and the study of a huge range of newspapers, books, and pamphlets, the book has an immediacy which is startling. Over 100 illustrations sharpen the focus still more. Kelly weaves together information about the relationships between children and adults, prevailing ideas about childhood, and the actual experiences of children to create an unforgettable account of the intimate workings of Russian and Soviet society.

Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991

In Modern Times (1936), Charlie Chaplin plays a factory worker at the ElectroSteel Company, tightening nuts on a fast-moving conveyor belt. One scene shows a mechanical contraption designed to feed workers lunch while they remain on the assembly line, but it malfunctions, throwing soup in Charlie’s face. Other scenes depict a capitalist owner who maintains closed-circuit surveillance over the plant and demands increases in the speed of the line. Unable to keep pace, Charlie falls into the giant gears. He has a nervous breakdown, and loses his job. On the street, he’s mistaken for a communist leader and arrested. He accidentally prevents a jailbreak, is pardoned and released, but with his old steel plant idle, Charlie cannot find employment, and begins to long for the shabby security of incarceration. The political message of “Modern Times” would seem unmistakable.

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/modern_times_the_soviet_union_and_the_interwar_conjuncture_0.pdf

Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture

The development of post-socialist cities has emerged as a major field of study among critical theorists from across the social sciences. Originally constructed under the dictates of central planners and designed to serve the demands of command economies, post-socialist urban centers currently develop at the nexus of varied and often competing economic, cultural, and political forces. Among these, nationalist aspirations, previously simmering beneath the official rhetoric of communist fraternity and veneer of architectural conformity, have emerged as dominant factors shaping the urban landscape. This article examines patterns, processes, and practices concerning the cultural politics of architecture, urban planning, and identity in the post-socialist city. In addition to assessing the main contours of this burgeoning field of research, this article highlights how this special issue of Nationalities Papers contributes to a broader understanding of contemporary cultural and political change in post-socialist...

From socialist to post-socialist cities: narrating the nation through urban space

Nina Konradovna Slobodinskaya - sculptor of Soviet epoch and space. Her creative work embraces more than 50 years and mirrors all artistic tendencies, actual subjects, main sculptural genres of the most contradictory, bloody period of XX century. Undoubtedly, the artist belongs to her time, sensitively facing and reacting at issues and challenges posed by the epoch, reflecting them in her artworks. However, the sculptor was able to become an independent master, choosing deeply human and supertemporal subjects in her creative work. Finally, following her proper artistic inclinations she contradicted the strict artistic rules of Soviet reality. Hence Nina Slobodinskaya opposed herself to the State’s demands, dooming her creative work to social disregard and ignoration, and therefore was consigned to the oblivion. Noble by origin, being a part of Russian cultural intelligentsia, she was capable to adapt and transmit her world vision’s beliefs into sculptures, enriching them with symbolical multi-level content. Accordingly, discovering a sculptor with a proper artistic vision and a developed individual style we also find a reflection of philosophical and spiritual beliefs of Russian intelligentsia, which by their system of values still belongs to the former Imperial Russia and, therefore, was condemned to the extermination by Stalin’s and Lenin’s policy.

Sculptor Nina Slobodinskaya (1898-1984). Life and search of creative boundaries in the Soviet epoch

A note on transliteration 1. Overcoming the reader: the aesthetics of reception - &#225 la Sovie tique 2. Grains of humanity 3. The disaster of mediocre taste or, who 'thought up' Socialist Realism? The reader as critic 4. Storing up readers: the school and the ideology of literature 5. The power and powerlessness of books: from 'cultural revolution' to 'cultural construction' 6. The end of a perspective: the library - turning loaves into stones 7. The art of belonging to the people: from the empirical to the ideal reader 8. Korchagin's happiness: the ideal reader Notes Bibliography Index.

The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature

List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsNote of TransliterationIntroduction--Eric NaimanPART ONE: SPACE AND ART1. Socialist Realism and the Sacralizing of Space--Katerina Clark2. The Spatial Poetics of the Personality Cult: Circles around Stalin--Jan Plamper3. Spatial Figures in Soviet Cinema of the 1930s--Oksana Bulgakowa4. "Broad is My Motherland": The Mother Archetype and Space in the Soviet Mass Song--Hans Gunther5. The Art of Totality--Boris GroysPART TWO: MOBILIZING THE SOVIET SUBJECT6. All This Can Be Yours!: Soviet Commercial Advertising and the Social Construction of Space, 1928-1956--Randi Cox7. The Art of Social Navigation: The Cultural Topography of the Stalin Era--Evgeny Dobrenko8. "But Eastward, Look, the Land is Brighter": Toward a Topography of Utopia in the Stalinist Musical--Richard TaylorPART THREE: THE BLANK PAGE9. To Explore or Conquer?: Mobil Perspectives on the Soviet Cultural Revolution--Emma Widdis10. Tabula Rasa in the North: The Soviet Arctic and Mythic Landscapes in Stalinist Popular Culture--John McCannon11. "The Best in the World": The Discourse of the Moscow Metro in the 1930s--Mikhail Ryklin12. Russo-Soviet Topoi--Mikhail EpsteinContributors Index

The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space

"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 'centre,' Russia, to various points at the 'periphery' - China, Germany, France, Poland, remote republics of the former USSR, and the United States.The contributors argue that socialist realism has never been a monolithic art form and demonstrate, among other things, that its literature could accommodate psychoanalytic criticism; that its art and architecture could affect the aesthetic dictates of Moscow that made 'Soviet' art paradoxically heterogeneous; and that its aesthetics could accommodate both high art and crafted kitsch. "Socialist Realism without Shores" also addresses the critical discourse provoked by socialist realism - Stalinist aesthetics, 'anthropological' readings; ideology critique and censorship; and the sublimely ironic approaches adapted from sots art, the Soviet version of postmodernism. The contributors include: Antoine Baudin, Svetlana Boym, Greg Castillo, Katerina Clark, Evgeny Dobrenko, Boris Groys, Hans Gunther, Julia Hell, Leonid Heller, Mikhail Iampolski, Thomas Lahusen, Regine Robin, Yuri Slezkine, Lily Wiatrowski Phillips, Xudong Zhang, and Sergei Zimovets.

Socialist Realism without Shores

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 advertising-Dobrenko examines Stalinism's representational strategies and demonstrates how real socialism was begotten of Socialist Realism. Socialist Realism, he concludes, was Stalinism's most effective sociopolitical institution.

Political economy of socialist realism

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 answers to the basic problems of Stalinist aesthetics-such as "political control," "repressions," and "pressure from the regime." However, the author demonstrates that Socialist Realism is not so much directed as it is self-directed; it is not a matter of control but of self-control. The transformation of the author into his own censor is the true history of Soviet literature. Socialist Realism is cultural revolution not only from above but from below as well. The state simply took into account, and accurately discerned, the demands of the masses, and Soviet literature became the reader's answer to these demands. The reader not only shaped Socialist Realist aesthetics down to his own expectations, but in fact created it. The Soviet writer was yesterday's Soviet reader who had learned how to write books. The Soviet writer can be called the product of authority only to the extent that this authority recognized and institutionalized what Lenin called the "lively creativity of the masses." On the other hand, the author shows, the Soviet writer is the radical realization and embodiment of the nineteenth-century Russian populist utopia of enlightenment of the people.

Evgeny Dobrenko

Papers

The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature

The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space

Socialist Realism without Shores

Political economy of socialist realism

The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture