This volume brings together two classic works on the culture of the Russian people which have been long out of print. Gorer's Great Russian Culture and Mead's Soviet Attitudes towards Authority: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Problems of Soviet Character were among the first attempts by anthropologists to analyze Russian society. They were influential both for several generations of anthropologists and in shaping American governmental attitudes toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War period. Additionally they offer fascinating insights into the early anthropological use of psychological data to analyze cultural patterns. Read as part of the history of the anthropology of complex contemporary societies, they are as fascinating for their more questionable conclusions as for their accurate characterizations of Russian life.

This timely text charts the metamorphosis of Russian media and culture in the 21st century. It considers how, when Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, Russia's media and culture industry had enjoyed nearly a decade of almost unrestricted freedom and yet, by the time he launched his illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia's independent media was crushed, while the few viable opposition figures were either imprisoned, exiled, or dead under mysterious circumstances. Eliot Borenstein looks at the manufactured cult of Putin, the competing models of Russianness put forth in the media, the obsession with nostalgia and the limits on imagining the future, the rise of aggressive patriotism and the myth of ancient Russian 'traditional' values, the significance of the fight against 'gay propaganda', and the absurdist strategies used by the opposition in the face of increasing restrictions on free speech. Though the book's title invokes Putin, Russian Culture under Putin does not cast the Russian leader as an all-knowing genius pursuing a master plan. The culture of the past twenty years, both official and independent, has been largely improvisational. 21st-century Russia, as Borenstein demonstrates so masterfully, has not been frog-marched into unfreedom, but has in fact lurched back and forth on a dimly-lit path.

Examining the work of impresarios, financiers, and the press as well as the artists themselves, Hohman demonstrates how a variety of Russian theatrical styles were introduced and incorporated into American theatre and dance during the beginning of the twentieth century.

Much of the previous scholarship on Russia's literary discourses of sexuality and eroticism in the Silver Age was built on applying European theoretical models (from psychoanalysis to feminist theory) to Russia's modernization. This book argues that, at the turn into the twentieth century, Russian popular culture for the first time found itself in direct confrontation with the traditional high cultures of the upper classes and intelligentsia, producing modernized representations of sexuality. This Russian tradition of conflicted representations, heretofore misassessed by literary history, emerges as what Foucault would call a full-blown “bio-history” of Russian culture: a history of indigenous representations of sexuality and the eroticized body capable of innovation on its own terms, not just those derivative from Europe.

A Stanford University Press classic.

This book is the first interdisciplinary treatment of the cultural significance of the Decembrists' mythic image in Russian literature, history, film and opera in a survey of its deployment as cultural trope since the original 1825 rebellion and through the present day.

This translation makes available to English readers the only comprehensive and thorough history of Russian culture in any language. Endowed with scholarly authority, it traces in broad outline the long rich story of the development of religion, literature, and the arts from their earliest manifestations to modern times. The contrast of Christianity in Russia with the Western Church, the retarded development and then suddenly blooming of literature in the 19th century, the individuality of Russian genius in architecture, painting, and music are described and evaluated, the whole forming a penetrating insight into Russian backgrounds and character. For the convenience of those only interested in separate sections, the book is issued in three parts as standalone volumes: Part I: Religion and the Church Part II: Literature Part III: Architecture, Painting and Music

Bringing together a team of scholars from the diverse fields of geography, literary studies, and history, this is the first volume to study water as a cultural phenomenon within the Russian/Soviet context. Water in this context is both a cognitive and cultural construct and a geographical and physical phenomenon, representing particular rivers (the Volga, the Chusovaia in the Urals, the Neva) and bodies of water (from Baikal to sacred springs and the flowing water of nineteenth-century estates), but also powerful systems of meaning from traditional cultures and those forged in the radical restructuring undertaken in the 1930s. Individual chapters explore the polyvalence and contestation of meanings, dimensions, and values given to water in various times and spaces in Russian history. The reservoir of symbolic association is tapped by poets and film-makers but also by policy-makers, the popular press, and advertisers seeking to incite reaction or drive sales. The volume's emphasis on the cultural dimensions of water will link material that is often widely disparate in time and space; it will also serve as the methodological framework for the analysis undertaken both within chapters and in the editors' introduction.

The political changes at the end of the last century in the Soviet Union, and later the Russian Federation, had deep-reaching repercussions on the interpretation of Russian culture in the time of division between “Russia Abroad” and “Russia at Home”. Ever since, scholars have tried to understand and to describe the interrelationship between the two Russias. In spite of intensive research, numerous conferences and publications, there are still many discoveries to be made and a number of questions to be answered. This volume presents a selection of articles based on papers presented at an international conference on Russian émigré culture that was held at Saarland University, Germany, in 2015. The essays assembled here offer new insights into aspects of Russian émigré culture already known to scholarship, but also to explore new facets of it. As such, it is not the well-known centres and leading figures of Russian emigration that are highlighted; instead the authors give prominence to places of seemingly secondary importance such as Prague, Istanbul or India and to such lesser-known aspects as collections and collectors of Russian émigré art and the impact of cultural activities of the Russian emigration on the culture of the respective host countries.

Jewishness in Russian Culture is devoted to new approaches and methods for the study of Jewish acculturation in Russian literature and its effects. It attempts to redefine criteria and borders of a discipline situated roughly between Judaica Rossica and Rossica Judaica. The monograph describes a series of important literary Russian-Jewish cultural events and figures belonging synchronically or diachronically to both disciplines. Thus it unites within a new conceptual framework the data accumulated by scholars and disciplines that exist separately in different research spaces that do not overlap, Jewish Studies and the history of Russian culture. The emerging picture shows the development of a historical plot along the axis of acculturation and anti-Semitism, accepting and/or trying to be accepted, being rejected and/or rejecting, and being within or without.