Description
Book SynopsisRussians have often been characterized as people with souls rather than selves. Self and Story in Russian History challenges the portrayal of the Russian character as selfless, self-effacing, or self-torturing by exploring the texts through which...
Trade ReviewAn excellent and fascinating collection.
-- Lynne Atwood, University of Manchester * American Historical Review *
Self and Story is a thought-provoking and complex collection. The contributors... are of a uniformly high quality, generally lively and edifying and always painstakingly researched.... Self and Story offers many rewards. It provides rich empirical justification for the study of the evolution of notions of self, individuality, subjectivity and personality in Russian culture and opens up an exciting new terrain for future research.
-- Peter Pozefsky * H-Russia *
The collection balances out the emphasis on the significance of literary narrative in the formation of the Russian self with its discussions of the opportunities provided by the new media of the early twentieth century, and its studies of testimony, memoir, and private diaries. The volume is important, not only for the breadth of issues it treats, but for its interdisciplinary approach.
-- Harriet Murav, University of California Davis * Slavic Review *
The innovative thinking reflected in the essays owes debts to such sources as psychoanalysis, deconstructionist theory, and the ideas of Michel Foucault.... While some of the essays will appeal mainly to specialists, others... will probably be of broader interest.
* Choice *
This collection is a valuable addition to the historiography of Imperial and Soviet Russian society. True to its title, Self and Story, the somewhat unorthodox theme allows the authors to explore familiar subjects in new and interesting ways.
-- Nicole L. Young, University of Toronto * Canadian Slavonic Papars *
This volume is a fine and timely intervention in the changing field of Russian cultural history. The editors join their expertise in history, literature, and gender studies to pose a question that recent research on Russian and Soviet social and intellectual history has rendered unavoidable: what was the status of the self in pre- and postrevolutionary Russia, and, equally important, how was the sense of individual identity constructed and produced?
-- GalinTihanov, Lancaster University * The Russian Review *
