Leningrad Poetry 1953-1975

Leningrad Poetry 1953-1975

Author: Emily Lygo

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9783039113705

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Based on author's Ph.D. thesis, from University of Oxford, 2005.


St Petersburg

St Petersburg

Author: Catriona Kelly

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2014-02-25

Total Pages: 485

ISBN-13: 0300169183

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"Fragile, gritty, and vital to an extraordinary degree, St Petersburg is one of the world's most alluring cities - a place in which the past is at once ubiquitous and inescapably controversial. This book shows how creative engagement with the past has always been fundamental to St Petersburg's residents"--From front jacket flap.


Discourses of Regulation and Resistance

Discourses of Regulation and Resistance

Author: Samantha Sherry

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2015-06-14

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0748698035

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Despite tense relations between the USSR and the West, Soviet readers were voracious consumers of foreign culture and literature. This book explores this ambivalent and contradictory attitude and employs in depth analysis of archive material to offer a comprehensive study of the censorship of translated literature in the Soviet Union.


American–Soviet Cultural Diplomacy

American–Soviet Cultural Diplomacy

Author: Cadra Peterson McDaniel

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2014-11-18

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0739199315

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American–Soviet Cultural Diplomacy: The Bolshoi Ballet’s American Premiere is the first full-length examination of a Soviet cultural diplomatic effort. Following the signing of an American-Soviet cultural exchange agreement in the late 1950s, Soviet officials resolved to utilize the Bolshoi Ballet’s planned 1959 American tour to awe audiences with Soviet choreographers’ great accomplishments and Soviet performers’ superb abilities. Relying on extensive research, Cadra Peterson McDaniel examines whether the objectives behind Soviet cultural exchange and the specific aims of the Bolshoi Ballet’s 1959 American tour provided evidence of a thaw in American-Soviet relations. Interwoven throughout this study is an examination of the Soviets’ competing efforts to create ballets encapsulating Communist ideas while simultaneously reinterpreting pre-revolutionary ballets so that these works were ideologically acceptable. McDaniel investigates the rationale behind the creation of the Bolshoi’s repertoire and the Soviet leadership’s objectives and interpretation of the tour’s success as well as American response to the tour. The repertoire included the four ballets, Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, Giselle, and The Stone Flower, and two Highlights Programs, which included excerpts from various pre- and post-revolutionary ballets, operas, and dance suites. How the Americans and the Soviets understood the Bolshoi’s success provides insight into how each side conceptualized the role of the arts in society and in political transformation. American–Soviet Cultural Diplomacy: The Bolshoi Ballet’s American Premiere demonstrates the ballet’s role in Soviet foreign policy, a shift to "artful warfare," and thus emphasizes the significance of studying cultural exchange as a key aspect of Soviet foreign policy and analyzes the continued importance of the arts in twenty-first century Russian politics.


Socialist Fun

Socialist Fun

Author: Gleb Tsipursky

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2016-09-03

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 0822981254

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Most narratives depict Soviet Cold War cultural activities and youth groups as drab and dreary, militant and politicized. In this study Gleb Tsipursky challenges these stereotypes in a revealing portrayal of Soviet youth and state-sponsored popular culture. The primary local venues for Soviet culture were the tens of thousands of clubs where young people found entertainment, leisure, social life, and romance. Here sports, dance, film, theater, music, lectures, and political meetings became vehicles to disseminate a socialist version of modernity. The Soviet way of life was dutifully presented and perceived as the most progressive and advanced, in an attempt to stave off Western influences. In effect, socialist fun became very serious business. As Tsipursky shows, however, Western culture did infiltrate these activities, particularly at local levels, where participants and organizers deceptively cloaked their offerings to appeal to their own audiences. Thus, Soviet modernity evolved as a complex and multivalent ideological device. Tsipursky provides a fresh and original examination of the Kremlin's paramount effort to shape young lives, consumption, popular culture, and to build an emotional community—all against the backdrop of Cold War struggles to win hearts and minds both at home and abroad.


Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar 1974-1980

Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar 1974-1980

Author: Josephine von Zitzewitz

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-12

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1317198522

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The Religious-Philosophical Seminar, meeting in Leningrad between 1974-1980, was an underground study group where young intellectuals staged debates, read poetry and circulated their own typewritten journal, called ‘37’. The group and its journal offered a platform to poets who subsequently entered the canon of Russian verse, such as Viktor Krivulin (1944-2001) and Elena Shvarts (1948-2010). Josephine von Zitzewitz’s new study focuses on the Seminar’s identification of culture and spirituality, which allowed Leningrad’s unofficial culture to tap into the spirit of Russian modernism, as can be seen in ‘37’. This book is thus a study of a major current in twentieth-century Russian poetry, and an enquiry into the intersection between literary and spiritual concerns. But it also presents case studies of five poets from a special generation: not only Krivulin and Shvarts, but also Sergei Stratanovskii (1944-), Oleg Okhapkin (1944-2008) and Aleksandr Mironov (1948-2010).


Coloniality, Nationality, Modernity

Coloniality, Nationality, Modernity

Author: Epp Annus

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 1351042971

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Soviet postcolonial studies is an emerging field of critical inquiry, with its locus of interest in colonial aspects of the Soviet experience in the USSR and beyond. The articles in this collection offer a postcolonial perspective on Baltic societies and cultures – that is, a perspective sensitive to the effects of Soviet colonialism. The colonial situation is typically sustained by the help of colonial discourses which carry the pathos of progress and civilization. In Soviet colonial discourse, the pathos of progress is presented in terms of communist value systems, which developed certain principles of the European Enlightenment and rearticulated them through Soviet ideology. This collection explores the establishment of Soviet colonial power structures, but also strategic continuities between Soviet and Tsarist rule and the legacy of Soviet colonialism in post-Soviet Baltics. Soviet norms and rules, imposed upon the Baltic borderlands, produced new forms of transculturation, gave birth to new cultural ‘authenticities,’ and developed complex entanglements of colonial, modern and national impulses. Analyses of colonial patterns in Soviet and post-Soviet Baltic societies helps bring us closer to understanding the Soviet legacy in the former Soviet borderlands and in present-day Russia. The chapters were originally published in a special issue of the Journal of Baltic Studies.


Flowers Through Concrete

Flowers Through Concrete

Author: Juliane Fürst

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-03-11

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 0191092517

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Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland takes the reader on a journey into the lives and thoughts of Soviet hippies. In the face of disapproval and repression, they created a version of Western counterculture, skillfully adapting to, manipulating, and shaping their late socialist environment. Flowers through Concrete takes its readers into the underground hippieland and beyond, situating the world of hippies firmly in late Soviet reality and offering both an unusual history of the last Soviet decades as well as a case study of transnational youth culture and East-West globalization. Flowers through Concrete is based on over a hundred interviews, declassified documents, and private archives hidden for many decades. It tells the almost forgotten story of how hippie communities sprang up across the Soviet Union in the late-60s, often under the tutelage of the rebellious offspring of privileged households at the heart of the Soviet establishment. It charts how these communities linked up to create an impressive network with elaborate customs and rituals, ensuring its survival for more than two decades. Flowers through Concrete recounts not only a compelling story of survival against the odds - hippies who were harassed by police, shorn of their hair by civilian guards, and confined in psychiatric hospitals by doctors who believed non-conformism was a symptom of schizophrenia - but also advances a surprising argument. It suggests that the land of Soviet hippies and the world of late socialism were not entirely incompatible, but in fact meshed surprisingly well. Ultimately, it was not the KGB but the arrival of capitalism in the 1990s that ended the Soviet hippie sistema.


The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania

The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania

Author: Violeta Davoliūtė

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-01-03

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 1134693583

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Appearing on the world stage in 1918, Lithuania suffered numerous invasions, border changes and large scale population displacements.The successive occupations of Stalin in 1940 and Hitler in 1941, mass deportations to the Gulag and the elimination of the Jewish community in the Holocaust gave the horrors of World War II a special ferocity. Moreover, the fighting continued after 1945 with the anti-Soviet insurrection, crushed through mass deportations and forced collectivization in 1948-1951. At no point, however, did the process of national consolidation take a pause, making Lithuania an improbably representative case study of successful nation-building in this troubled region. As postwar reconstruction gained pace, ethnic Lithuanians from the countryside – the only community to remain after the war in significant numbers – were mobilized to work in the cities. They streamed into factory and university alike, creating a modern urban society, with new elites who had a surprising degree of freedom to promote national culture. This book describes how the national cultural elites constructed a Soviet Lithuanian identity against a backdrop of forced modernization in the fifties and sixties, and how they subsequently took it apart by evoking the memory of traumatic displacement in the seventies and eighties, later emerging as prominent leaders of the popular movement against Soviet rule.