Description
Book SynopsisThe idea that morally, mentally, and physically superior new men' might replace the currently existing mankind has periodically seized the imagination of intellectuals, leaders, and reformers throughout history. This volume offers a multidisciplinary investigation into how the new man' was made in Russia and the early Soviet Union in the first third of the 20th century. The traditional narrative of the Soviet new man' as a creature forged by propaganda is challenged by the strikingly new and varied case studies presented here. The book focuses on the interplay between the rapidly developing experimental life sciences, such as biology, medicine, and psychology, and countless cultural products, ranging from film and fiction, dolls and museum exhibits to pedagogical projects, sculptures, and exemplary agricultural fairs. With contributions from scholars based in the United States, Canada, the UK, Germany and Russia, the picture that emerges is emphatically more complex, contradictory,
Trade ReviewKrementsov and Howell have assembled a host of original pieces of research from a range of humanities’ subfields to illuminate the multiplicity of ways in which Russians negotiated, envisioned, and performed the fantasies of humankind’s renovation across the first four decades of the twentieth century. * Andy Byford, Director of Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, UK *
The New Man has long been recognized as a crucial topic by those who study revolutionary Russia, the early Soviet Union, and Stalinism. Its study takes a big step forward in this wide-ranging and thought-provoking volume. Delving into science, philosophy, ideology, education, literature, film, exhibitions, and more, the works gathered here aim to recover actors’ meanings and intent when invoking the New Man in specific contexts. These investigations, taken together, bring us closer to understanding why the New Man became so central to the Soviet century. * Michael David-Fox, Historian of modern Russia and the USSR, Georgetown University, USA *
Table of ContentsPreface List of Illustrations Introduction
Nikolai Krementsov (University of Toronto, Canada) Part 1 – Nurturing the New Man 1. Encyclopedic Worldbuilding: Alexander Bogdanov and the Cognitive Creation of the New Man
Michael Coates (University of California, Berkeley, USA) 2. ‘The RoadtoLife’: Educating the New Man
Lyubov Bugaeva (Saint Petersburg State University, Russia) 3. The New Man in the Nursery: Making Soviet Dolls and Regulating Children’s Play in the 1920s and 30s
Olga Ilyukha (Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia) Part 2 – Imagining the New Man 4. New Sciences, New Worlds, and ‘New Men’
Nikolai Krementsov (University of Toronto, Canada) 5. Entertaining Sciences, Unlikely Horrors: The Changing Image of Man in Soviet Popular-Scientific Literary Genres
Matthias Schwartz (Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Germany) 6. The New Man as a Monster of Eugenic Imagination: The Criminal Brain in Mikhail Bulgakov’s ‘Heart of a Dog’ and James Whale’s
Frankenstein Irina Golovacheva (St. Petersburg State University, Russia) Part 3 – Displaying the New Man 7. ‘A School of the Peasantry of the Future’: Constructing the Image of a ‘New Peasant’ at the 1923 All-Russian Agricultural Exhibition
Olga Elina (Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia) 8. Revolutionary Evolution in Apes and Humans in the 1920s: Sculpture and Constructs of the New Man at the Moscow Darwin Museum
Pat Simpson (University of Hertfordshire, UK) 9. A New Man in the Ethnographic Museum: Between the Socialist Content and the National Form
Stanislav Petriashin (Russian Museum of Ethnography, Russia) Part 4 – Conclusion The New Man: One Hundred Years Later
Yvonne Howell (University of Richmond, USA) List of Contributors Index
