Search results for ""Author Evgeny Dobrenko""

How the last years of Stalin’s rule led to the formation ofan imperial Soviet consciousness In this nuanced historical analysis of late Stalinism organized chronologically around the main events of the period—beginning with Victory in May 1945 and concluding with the death of Stalin in March 1953—Evgeny Dobrenko analyzes key cultural texts to trace the emergence of an imperial Soviet consciousness that, he argues, still defines the political and cultural profile of modern Russia.

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This book explores how Soviet film worked with time, the past, and memory. It looks at Stalinist cinema and its role in the production of history, the conversion of the present and experience into history, mechanisms of transfer, and what is located between history and the past. The representation of history is always the representation of power. The institution of legitimization and the mechanism for the production of identity, history is the past, constructed and served by the authorities who are attempting to curtail the experience by packaging it into a literary narrative and new visual imagery. Cinema's role in the legitimization of Stalinism and the production of a new Soviet identity was enormous. Both Lenin and Stalin saw in this 'most important of arts' the most effective form of propaganda and 'organisation of the masses'. By examining the works of the greatest Soviet filmmakers of the Stalin era -- Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Grigorii Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, Fridrikh Ermler, Mark Donskoi, Mikhail Romm -- the author explores the role of the cinema in the formation of the Soviet political imagination.Key Features *The first study of Stalinist cinema, which fills a gap in the history of Soviet film. *Covers the works of great Soviet film directors. *Focuses on Stalinist political imagination, one of the most understudied aspects of Stalinism.

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This wide-ranging cultural history explores the expression of Bolshevik Party ideology through the lens of landscape, or, more broadly, space. Portrayed in visual images and words, the landscape played a vital role in expressing and promoting ideology in the former Soviet Union during the Stalin years, especially in the 1930s. At the time, the iconoclasm of the immediate postrevolutionary years had given way to nation building and a conscious attempt to create a new Soviet “culture.” In painting, architecture, literature, cinema, and song, images of landscape were enlisted to help mold the masses into joyful, hardworking citizens of a state with a radiant, utopian future -- all under the fatherly guidance of Joseph Stalin. From backgrounds in history, art history, literary studies, and philosophy, the contributors show how Soviet space was sanctified, coded, and “sold” as an ideological product. They explore the ways in which producers of various art forms used space to express what Katerina Clark calls “a cartography of power” -- an organization of the entire country into “a hierarchy of spheres of relative sacredness,” with Moscow at the center. The theme of center versus periphery figures prominently in many of the essays, and the periphery is shown often to be paradoxically central. Examining representations of space in objects as diverse as postage stamps, a hikers’ magazine, advertisements, and the Soviet musical, the authors show how cultural producers attempted to naturalize ideological space, to make it an unquestioned part of the worldview. Whether focusing on the new or the centuries-old, whether exploring a built cityscape, a film documentary, or the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, the authors offer a consistently fascinating journey through the landscape of the Soviet ideological imagination. Not all features of Soviet space were entirely novel, and several of the essayists assert continuities with the prerevolutionary past. One example is the importance of the mother image in mass songs of the Stalin period; another is the "boundless longing" inspired in the Russian character by the burden of living amid vast empty spaces. But whether focusing on the new or the centuries-old, whether exploring a built cityscape, a film documentary, or the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, the authors offer a consistently fascinating journey through the landscape of the Soviet ideological imagination.

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The first complete and accurate English translation of Bulgakov’s classic novel, accompanied by a substantial historical introduction “Bulgakov’s novel not only leads us into a majestic, more-than-1,000-year-old metropolis, but also gives us an understanding of how, in a single day, the world can change as radically as if decades had passed.”—Marci Shore, The Atlantic “Bulgakov’s novel evokes the suffering of the conflict and the still greater horrors that lay ahead.”—Joshua Rubenstein, Wall Street Journal White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov’s semi-autobiographical first novel, is the story of the Turbin family in Kiev in 1918. Alexei, Elena, and Nikolka Turbin have just lost their mother—their father had died years before—and find themselves plunged into the chaotic civil war that erupted in the Ukraine in the wake of the Russian Revolution. In the context of this family’s personal loss and the social turmoil surrounding them, Bulgakov creates a brilliant picture of the existential crises brought about by the revolution and the loss of social, moral, and political certainties. He confronts the reader with the bewildering cruelty that ripped Russian life apart at the beginning of the last century as well as with the extraordinary ways in which the Turbins preserved their humanity. In this volume Marian Schwartz, a leading translator, offers the first complete and accurate translation of the definitive original text of Bulgakov’s novel. She includes the famous dream sequence, omitted in previous translations, and beautifully solves the stylistic issues raised by Bulgakov’s ornamental prose. Readers with an interest in Russian literature, culture, or history will welcome this superb translation of Bulgakov’s important early work. This edition also contains an informative historical essay by Evgeny Dobrenko.

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In Soviet culture, the reader was never a “consumer of books” in the Western sense. According to the aesthetic doctrine at the heart of Socialist Realism, the reader was a subject of education, to be reforged and molded. Because of this, Soviet culture cannot be examined properly without taking into account the reading masses. This book is a history of the shaping of the reader of Soviet literature, a history of the “State appropriation of the reader.” The entire history of the formation and transformation of the institution of literature in the revolutionary and Soviet eras bears witness to the fact that literature was called upon to perform substantive political and ideological functions in the authorities’ overall system (which included the publishing business, the book trade, libraries, and schools) aimed at ultimately creating a new Soviet person. This book shows how people from various social classes, in a dynamic unknown in pre-Soviet history, not only consumed the products of a new culture but in fact created that culture. On its own, the sociology of reading is scarcely capable of uncovering the variety, dynamism, and multilayered structure of the process of reading, for the reader is a composite figure. Soviet society in the Stalin era was not only a State-hierarchy system, but also a mosaic that was always divided into definite cultural strata, each of which consumed its own culture, which performed a host of familiar functions—escapist, socializing, compensating, informative, recreational, prestige-enhancing, aesthetic, and emotional—in addition to the specifically Soviet tastes connected with propaganda and mobilization. If we superimpose on this spectrum the diverse characteristics of individual readers, the resulting picture is extraordinarily variegated. At the same time, there is a certain cultural space in which these factors intersect—the space the author defines as the “situation of reading.” In this book, he focuses on the basic lines of force that were at work in the Soviet reading space.

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