RUSN 2150: Russian Culture: Books

Providing a comprehensive discussion of Russia's people, politics, economics, religion and social systems, the "Encyclopedia of Russian History complements the study of comparative politics, world history, geography, literature, arts and culture and world cultures. With approximately 1,600 entries and 500 illustrations, this four-volume set spans the time from the earliest beginnings of the Russian nation to the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.

This volume investigates energy as a shaping force in Russian and Soviet literature, visual culture, and social practice. Chronologically arranged chapters explain how nineteenth-century ideas about energy informed realist novels and paintings; how the poetics of energy defined pre-Revolutionary and Stalinist utopianism; and how fossil fuels, electricity, and nuclear fission generated distinct aesthetic features in Imperial Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet literature, cinema, and landscape. The volumes concentration on Russia responds to a clear need to understand the role the country plays in social, political, and economic processes endangering life on Earth today. The cultural dimension of Russias efforts at energy dominance deserves increased scholarly attention not only in its own right, but also because it directly affects global energy policy. As the contributors to this volume argue, the nationally inflected cultural myths that underlie human engagements with energy have been highly consequential in the Anthropocene. Jillian Porter is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. She is the author of Economies of Feeling: Russian Literature under Nicholas I (2017) and has published essays on money, commodities, and the queue in Russian and Soviet literature and cinema. Maya Vinokour is Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, USA. She studies Stalinist labor culture, late-Soviet science fiction, and post-Soviet media

Is there an essential Russian identity? What happens when "Russian" literature is written in English, by such authors as Gary Shteyngart or Lara Vapnyar? What is the geographic "home" of Russian culture created and shared via the internet? Global Russian Cultures innovatively considers these and many related questions about the literary and cultural life of Russians who in successive waves of migration have dispersed to the United States, Europe, and Israel, or who remained after the collapse of the USSR in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Central Asian states. The volume's internationally renowned contributors treat the many different global Russian cultures not as "displaced" elements of Russian cultural life but rather as independent entities in their own right. They describe diverse forms of literature, music, film, and everyday life that transcend and defy political, geographic, and even linguistic borders. Arguing that Russian cultures today are many, this volume contends that no state or society can lay claim to be the single or authentic representative of Russianness. In so doing, it contests the conceptions of culture and identity at the root of nation-building projects in and around Russia.

This book provides a remarkable overview of significant themes in Russian history and culture, in each case starting well before the eighteenth century, while frequently following them up into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Robin Milner-Gulland shows how the public face of Russia developed and evolved through its distinct architecture, astonishing art, and its varied public spaces. What emerges is a clear picture of how Russians fashioned their identity, and the national monuments associated with it, in their setting: the Russian natural landscape as well as distinctive elements of traditional material culture. Tellingly illustrated, concise and free of jargon, Patterns of Russia will appeal to all those with an interest in the history and culture of this complex--and much discussed--country.