Description
Book SynopsisUses the under-studied genre of melodrama as a critical prism for understanding Russian/Soviet history, politics and culture - in particular, the uses to which popular culture was put in the Soviet period.
Trade Review“Melodrama bore all the defects and virtues of its parent, the French Revolution. Given to wild flights, neck-breaking twists and turns, stark judgements of good and evil, the genre also brought public attention onto private life and the vicissitudes of underprivilege. Melodrama taught much to the Russians who appropriated it. As the contributors to the present volume demonstrate, it taught them how to see, to understand and even how to accomplish history. An imitator surely, but also a creator of life—we can all be grateful to Neuberger and McReynolds for bringing this to our attention.”—James von Geldern, Macalaster College
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction / Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger
The Misanthrope, the Orphan, and the Magpie: Imported Melodrama in the Twilight of Serfdom / Richard Stites
Melodramatizing Russia: Nineteenth-Century Views from the West / Julie A. Buckler
The Importance of Being Unhappy, or, Why She Died / Beth Holmgren
Melodrama as Counterliterature? Count Amori’s Response to Three Scandalous Novels / Otto Boele
Home Was Never Where the Heart Was: Domestic Dystopias in Russia’s Silent Movie Melodramas / Louise McReynolds
Alcohol is Our Enemy! Soviet Temperance Melodramas of the 1920s / Julie A. Cassiday
Melodrama and the Myth of the Soviet Union / Lars T. Lih
Soviet Family Melodrama of the 1940s and 1950s: From
Wait for Me to
The Cranes Are Flying / Alexander Prokhorov
Conventional Melodrama, Innovative Theater, and a Melodramatic Society: Pavel Kohout’s
Such a Love at the Moscow University Student Theater / Susan Constanzo
Between Public and Private: Revolution and Melodrama in Nikita Mikhalkov’s
Slave of Love / Joan Neuberger
Playing Dead: The Operatics of Celebrity Funerals, or, The Ultimate Silent Part / Helena Goscilo
Suggested Reading
Contributors
Index
