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Re- Entering the Sign brings together an array of perspectives from contemporary Russian scholars and artists on the radical cultural changes that have accompanied the collapse of familiar social, political, and economic structures in the former Soviet Union. The essays and artistic manifestoes offer a variety of responses to the intense cultural questioning that resulted from a remarkable historical period as former Soviet society reentered both its own historical conversations as well as larger global discussions about culture.
The collection was conceived at an international conference on language and the arts, "Language, Consciousness, and Society," whose organizers aimed to initiate dialogue within an international community of scholars and artists, to open a public arena for the confluence of new voices, including native voices long denied open access to the public sphere in their own country. The concerns raised in these essays continue to provoke debate in contemporary Russian culture.
Russian luminaries include Mikhail Epstein and Arcady Dragomoshchenko on topics such as Russian postmodernism, the state of contemporary artistic culture, comparisons of Soviet literature with new Russian literature, and underground cinema.
The book will appeal to students and scholars of comparative literature and film, to cultural critics interested in cross- and trans-cultural approaches, and to theorists of the contemporary avant-garde.
Ellen E. Berry is Associate Professor of English and Director of Women's Studies, Bowling Green State University, and author of Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein's Postmodernism. Anesa Miller-Pogacar is Assistant Professor of Russian, Bowling Green State University.
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The image of women in Russian culture has undergone profound changes: from the origins of modern Russian literature in the eighteenth century until the Revolution of 1917, when women were a source of fascination for Russian writers, to the socialist realism period, during which public discussion of the representation of women in literature rapidly declined and the "woman question" was declared to have been "resolved," to a reappraisal of the position of women since the 1980s.This collection of essays by leading western and Russian specialists contains new insights and updates previous research into the role of women in Russian culture in the last two centuries and contributes to two exciting and growing research areas: the feminist critique of work by Russian male authors and the study of Russian women writers. Moreover, whereas most previous studies have concentrated on the aesthetic qualities of works by women writers, this collection includes both close textual analysis and the discussion of biographical, historical, and political questions relating both to the representation of women and women's culture.The aim is not to present a unified manifesto, but rather to bring together a spectrum of approaches and positions within their common focus on the relationship between women and culture in Russia. ... Read more

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This study, based largely on original research in the archives of Moscow and Leningrad, sheds new light on the role played in Russian cultural development by those Ukrainians who chose to identify themselves with the Russian Empire. By stressing the native, Slavic aspects of imperial culture, Ukrainians modified the Russians' understanding of what it meant to be Russian, preventing them from becoming wholly dependent on contemporary Western Europe. In a wide-ranging, richly detailed analysis, David Saunders shows how this impact was achieved by Ukrainian educators, writers, journalists, scholars, and political figures.

Although significant, the Ukrainian impact was short-lived. The concluding chapter explains the tsarist government's imposition of an increasingly rigid conception of nationality on all its subjects led Ukrainians to assert their separate identity.

As the most comprehensive study of its subject, this book makes an important contribution to both Ukrainian and Russian history. ... Read more

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Combining concepts and methodologies from anthropology, history, linguistics, literature, music, cultural studies, and film studies, this collection of ten original essays addresses issues crucial to gender and national identity in Russia from the October Revolution of 1917 to the present. Prefaced by an introduction on Russian cultural myths grounded in gender difference, the essays shed new light on such topics as national, cultural, and gender identity in the Russian language; typecasting of women revolutionaries; soviet masculinity in Stalin-era film; and prostitution during and after perestroika.

Collectively, these interdisciplinary essays explore how traditional gender inequities influenced the social processes of nation building in Russia and how men and women responded to those developments. Gender and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Russian Culture offers fresh insights to students and scholars in the fields of gender studies, nationhood studies, and Russian history, literature, and culture. ... Read more

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OUTLINES OF RUSSIAN CULTUREBy PAUL MILIUKOVAUTHORS PREFACE SOME five and thirty years ago in the first book of mine to be published in the United States, I tried to give American readers a clearer understanding of Russia and of Russian problems through an analysis of the long evolution that had produced them. In the present book my method remains the same but how profoundly have things changed in Russia since 1905 The crisis that I then foretold has really come, and with it real revolution. The avowed aim of the victors in the revolution was the obliteration of all of Russias bourgeois past and the found ing of a Russia that would be a fatherland for the toiling masses of the whole world. Lwas not alone in believing that the habitua course of such attempts would be followed again, and that the high ideals and early successes would be greatly modified by the conditions that Ruias past had brought forth. Indeed, in rn second American bookjpublished in 1928 as the new regime reached the end of its first decade, I presented the trend in that light. The today of 1328 Was far from the tomorrow pre dicted in 1918. Actuality hadforced such substantial concessions that the result held few extraordinary revelations. But there was no admitted surrender. There were further exer tions, and the sacrifice of more millions of lives. Another dozen years has elapsed, and where are we now? The revolutionary cycle has apparently reached its predestined end. Under the new name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Re publics, Russia is still therea Russia even more centralized and ruled more severely than ever under the ancien rgimc but still Russia, The new Union is heir to all the evils o the old bureauc racy, evils that have been exaggerated while its few virtues have been eliminated. Far from international, Russian communism Russia and te Crisis 1905. has been restricted within its national borders and has followed a pattern that, whatever else it may be, is certainly not socialistic The only description, good or bad, that can be applied to Rus sian foreign policy is nationalistic imperialism. It was quite con sistent with this policy when the rulers of Russia issued orders that the communist manuals of history were to be rewritten to include the traditional structure of Russian history with the saints and heroes of the olden days. The link with the past was officially recognized. But it was only with the remote past, and between that past and the communist present there lay a period still inacceptable to the present rulers of Russiathe intermediate period of Russian bourgeois civilization. For the educated class that had made that civilization and had nurtured its growth in the last two or three centuries had been mercilessly destroyed in the storm, and as yet no other had taken its place. So the ascending spirals of evolution suffered a break, and the wit and wisdom of the old literature was not carried forward. The result was a lowering of the stand ards of culture. As in a geological cataclysm, lower strata were forced up to displace the higher. ... Read more

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The millennium of the adoption of Christianity in the Soviet Union, as well as Gorbachev's reforms, has refocused the attention of both rulers and ruled on the role religion plays in an officially atheist state. This book examines the current status of religion in the USSR, the importance of Christian symbols, and the impact that the full-fledged acceptance of Christianity would have on Soviet thought, culture, and politics. By bringing together representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, Soviet religious activists, and Western scholars, this book presents a multifaceted assessment of the contemporary and lasting significance of Christianity in Soviet society. ... Read more

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Interesting insights into human-animal relationships
This collection of scholarly essays surveys the amazingly complex human-animal relationships that pervade Russian culture, history and society and offers interesting insights into those relationships.

From the iconic bear, to a provincial dispute over a pig, to wolves, ferrets and horses, each essay offers an in-depth into one aspect of the anthro-animalia interface, as it were - usually one animal at a time. Among other things, we learn how the wolf came to be detested, why you should not throw a pig at a noblewoman, that Mayakovsky felt a particular kinship with animals, and what motivated noted animal trainer Vladimir Durov. This is a marvelous collection of academic essays that are accessible and of value to the general reader.

As reviewed by Russian Life ... Read more

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excellent
Fishman's writing is clear, unfussy, and remarkably good. Moreover, he shows incredible command of the material and avoids the political arguments that often accompany Yiddish academia. ... Read more

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The Rich Cultural Legacy of Russia
This book is similar in approach to the better known heaven and Hell by Bruce Lincoln.However, Billington concentartes more on the art and includes a beautiful section of plates.Unlike Lincoln's book, it is easily approached and is a reasonable 260 pages.Billington shows the connections between Russia's spiritual, historical and political traditions have played a direct role in defining its cultural and artistic production. He profiles individual artists and art forms.The painting of Rublev and the medieval stile on firewood, the architect Rastrelli, Gogol, Mussorsgki and Eisenstein primarily. the main point is that Russians learned from others, imitated and then transformed the art into a uniqe interpretation that reflected their reality that is often more ambitious and beautiful.anyone who's heard Rachmaninov's 2nd piano concerto or seen a painting by Repin should have no problem sahring this view. ... Read more

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In "Memory Eternal", Sergei Kan combines anthropology and history, anecdote and theory to portray the encounter between the Tlingit Indians and the Russian Orthodox Church in Alaska in the late 1700s and to analyze the indigenous Orthodoxy that developed over the next 200 years. As a native speaker of Russian with eighteen years of fieldwork experience among the Tlingit, Kan is uniquely qualified to relate little-known material from the archives of the Russian church in Alaska to Tlingit oral history and his own observations.By weighing the one body of evidence against the other, he has reevaluated this history, arriving at a persuasive new concept of 'converged agendas' - the view that the Tlingit and the Russians tended to act in mutually beneficial ways but for entirely different reasons throughout the period of their contact with one another. The Russian-American Company began operations in southeastern Alaska in the 1790s. Against a description of Tlingit culture at the time of the Russians' arrival, Kan examines Russian Orthodox theology, ritual practice, and missionary methods, and the Tlingit response to them.An uneasy symbiosis characterized the early era of the Russian-American Company, when the trading relationship outweighed any spiritual or social rapprochement.A second, major focus of Kan's study is the Tlingit experience with American colonial domination. He attributes a sudden revival of Tlingit interest in Orthodoxy in the 1880s as their attempt to maintain independence in the face of concerted efforts by the newcomers (and especially Presbyterian missionaries) to Americanize them."Memory Eternal" shows the colonial encounter to be both a power struggle and a dialogue between different systems of meaning. It portrays Native Alaskans not as helpless victims but as historical agents who attempted to adjust to the changing reality of their social world without abandoning fundamental principals of their precolonial sociocultural order or their strong sense of self-respect. Sergei Kan is professor of anthropology and Native American studies at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. ... Read more