The three playwrights presented together in this volume On the Road to Ourselves), Elena Gremina (Behind the Mirror) and Olga Mikhailova (Russian Dream). The selected plays contain many elements which will appeal to Western directors and audiences: well-drawn characters, engaging plots, lively wit. Central to the three plays selected in this volume is a complex interaction of Russian and Western value systems, a theme that becomes increasingly relevant for Russian audiences with each passing season and no less relevant for Europeans and Americans.
For over five hundred years the Russians wondered what kind of people their Arctic and sub-Arctic subjects were. "They have mouths between their shoulders and eyes in their chests," reported a fifteenth-century tale. "They rove around, live of their own free will, and beat the Russian people," complained a seventeenth-century Cossack. "Their actions are exceedingly rude. They do not take off their hats and do not bow to each other," huffed an eighteenth-century scholar. They are "children of nature" and "guardians of ecological balance," rhapsodized early nineteenth-century and late twentieth-century romantics. Even the Bolsheviks, who categorized the circumpolar foragers as "authentic proletarians," were repeatedly puzzled by the "peoples from the late Neolithic period who, by virtue of their extreme backwardness, cannot keep up either economically or culturally with the furious speed of the emerging socialist society."Whether described as brutes, aliens, or endangered indigenous populations, the so-called small peoples of the north have consistently remained a point of contrast for speculations on Russian identity and a convenient testing ground for policies and images that grew out of these speculations. In Arctic Mirrors, a vividly rendered history of circumpolar peoples in the Russian empire and the Russian mind, Yuri Slezkine offers the first in-depth interpretation of this relationship. No other book in any language links the history of a colonized non-Russian people to the full sweep of Russian intellectual and cultural history. Enhancing his account with vintage prints and photographs, Slezkine reenacts the procession of Russian fur traders, missionaries, tsarist bureaucrats, radical intellectuals, professional ethnographers, and commissars who struggled to reform and conceptualize this most "alien" of their subject populations.Slezkine reconstructs from a vast range of sources the successive official policies and prevailing attitudes toward the northern peoples, interweaving the resonant narratives of Russian and indigenous contemporaries with the extravagant images of popular Russian fiction. As he examines the many ironies and ambivalences involved in successive Russian attempts to overcome northern—and hence their own—otherness, Slezkine explores the wider issues of ethnic identity, cultural change, nationalist rhetoric, and not-so European colonialism.
The return of the 'Soviet' or the 'national' in Putin's Russia? -- The white knight and the red queen : blinded by love -- Shared mental models of the late soviet period -- The new Russian identity and the burden of the Soviet past -- Constructing the collective trauma of the -- MMM for VVP : building the modern media machine -- Le cirque politique a la russe : political talk shows and public opinion leaders in Russia -- Searching for a new mirror : on human and collective dignity in Russia.
First published in 1970, Professor Gerschenkron's theme is the contribution which the study of Russian economic history can make to the problems which have preoccupied Western historians. He first considers the way in which the case of the old Believers in Russia, who refused to support the official church but played an important entrepreneurial role in nineteenth-century economic development, bears upon Max Weber's celebrated thesis on the relations between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. In the course of his discussion, Professor Gerschenkron provides important information on the doctrinal beliefs of this group, their social status and the extent to which they were persecuted and discriminated against by the State. His conclusion is that the persecution certainly afforded sufficient impulse to engage in profitable activities and to develop the traits Weber considered as specific features of the 'capitalist' spirit.
This book examines the current state and the prospects for democracy in Russia in the light of the experience of existing democracies. Posing several challenges to our understanding of democracy, thirteen contributors argue some of the central questions vital to understanding the conditions of emergence and survival of successful democracies.
Youngblood provides a cultural perspective of an era traditionally viewed through a revolutionary lens, exploring how films and the film industry illuminate and reflect the popular attitudes of a turbulent time.
As K. Nomizu has justly noted [K. Nomizu, 56], Differential Geometry ever will be initiating newer and newer aspects of the theory of Lie groups. This monograph is devoted to just some such aspects of Lie groups and Lie algebras. New differential geometric problems came into being in connection with so called subsymmetric spaces, subsymmetries, and mirrors introduced in our works dating back to 1957 [L.V. Sabinin, 58a,59a,59b]. In addition, the exploration of mirrors and systems of mirrors is of interest in the case of symmetric spaces. Geometrically, the most rich in content there appeared to be the homogeneous Riemannian spaces with systems of mirrors generated by commuting subsymmetries, in particular, so called tri-symmetric spaces introduced in [L.V. Sabinin, 61b]. As to the concrete geometric problem which needs be solved and which is solved in this monograph, we indicate, for example, the problem of the classification of all tri-symmetric spaces with simple compact groups of motions. Passing from groups and subgroups connected with mirrors and subsymmetries to the corresponding Lie algebras and subalgebras leads to an important new concept of the involutive sum of Lie algebras [L.V. Sabinin, 65]. This concept is directly concerned with unitary symmetry of elementary par- cles (see [L.V. Sabinin, 95,85] and Appendix 1). The first examples of involutive (even iso-involutive) sums appeared in the - ploration of homogeneous Riemannian spaces with and axial symmetry. The consideration of spaces with mirrors [L.V. Sabinin, 59b] again led to iso-involutive sums.
Australia in the Russian Mirror is a study of Russian images of Australia from 1770 to 1919. Elena Govor, a recent emigrant from the former Soviet Union and leading authority on Russian writings on Australia, has drawn on over 1700 sources to present a revealing study of Russians' perceptions of Australia from its earliest settlement to its development and emergence as a nation. Voices of Russian visitors, armchair writers and emigres weave together both to create and to refute 'the Australian legend'. The naval officers who visited Port Jackson in the early 1800s came from the well-educated Russian nobility. They praised the transportation of convicts to Australia and the efforts of the authorities to reform them. But Russian emigrant labourers arrested and deported for participating in the Red Flag Riots in Brisbane in 1919 painted a very different picture of Australia's hostile judicial system. How and why such diversity of perceptions has evolved makes Australia in the Russian Mirror compelling reading.
Mirrorlands is a journey through space and time to the meeting points of Russia and China, the world's largest and most populous countries. Charting an unconventional course southeast through Siberia, Inner Mongolia, the Russian Far East and Manchuria, anthropologist and linguist Ed Pulford sketches a rich series of encounters with people and places unknown not only to outsiders, but also to most residents of the capital cities where his journey begins and ends. What Russia and China have in common goes much deeper than their status as authoritarian post-socialist states or perceived menaces to Western hegemony. Their shared history can only fully be appreciated from an intimately local, borderland perspective. Along remote roads, rivers and railways, in cosmopolitan cities and indigenous villages of the northeast Asian frontiers, Pulford maps the strikingly similar ways in which these two vast empires have ruled their Eurasian domains, before, during and after socialism. With great cultural nuance, Mirrorlands thoughtfully evokes the diverse daily interactions between residents of the Russia-China borderlands, and their resulting visions of "Europe" and "Asia." It is a vivid portrait of centuries of cross-border encounter, mimicry and conflict, key to understanding the global place and identity of two leading world powers.
“Who hasn't wondered what alternate versions of their lives might look like?...As relatable as it is suspenseful cleverly exploring adulthood, identity, and shifting realities.” —Margarita Montimore, USA Today bestselling author of Oona Out of Order An inventive page-turner about the choices we make and the ones made for us. One minute Kelly’s a free-spirited artist in Chicago going to her best friend’s art show. The next, she opens a door and mysteriously emerges in her Michigan hometown. Suddenly her life is unrecognizable: She's got twelve years of the wrong memories in her head and she's married to Eric, a man she barely knew in high school. Racing to get back to her old life, Kelly's search leads only to more questions. In this life, she loves Eric and wants to trust him, but everything she discovers about him—including a connection to a mysterious tech startup—tells her she shouldn't. And strange things keep happening. The tattoos she had when she was an artist briefly reappear on her skin, she remembers fights with Eric that he says never happened, and her relationships with loved ones both new and familiar seem to change without warning. But the closer Kelly gets to putting the pieces together, the more her reality seems to shift. And if she can't figure out what happened on that fateful night, the next change could cost her everything...
