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Gulag Fiction
This unique exploration of Russian prose fiction about the Soviet labour camp system since the Stalin era compares representations of identity, ethics and memory across the corpus. The Soviet labour camp system, or Gulag, was a highly complex network of different types of penal institutions, scattered across the vast Soviet territory and affecting millions of Soviet citizens directly and indirectly. As Gulag Fiction shows, its legacies remain palpable today, though survivors of the camps are now increasingly scarce, and successive Soviet and post-Soviet leaders have been reluctant to authorise a full working through of the Gulag past. This is the first book to compare Soviet, samizdat and post-Soviet literary prose about the Gulag as penal system, carceral experience and traumatic memory. Polly Jones analyses prose texts from across the 20th and 21st centuries through the prism of key themes in contemporary Soviet historiography and Holocaust literature scholarship: selfhood and survival; perpetration and responsibility; memory and post-memory.
The Oxford History of the Novel in English
An overview of US fiction since 1940 that explores the history of literary forms, the history of narrative forms, the history of the book, the history of media, and the history of higher education in the United States.
Soviet Internment
Using a microhistory based on a unique set of life-writing sources, this book provides an unparalleled insight into the Soviet POW experience during the Second World War. It reconstructs key moments in the life of former Italian POW Umberto Montini, who was captured by the Soviet Army in 1942, interned in a prisoners' hospital in Mordovia, and then repatriated to Italy in 1945. Through an analysis of Umberto's copious life-writings, Soviet Internment examines the testimony of a surviving WWII prisoner, whose memories were haunted by the fury of war and whose body carried deep physical and emotional traces but who nonetheless felt a nostalgic attachment to his place of internment. The book brings theoretical questions about memory, trauma, and European people's political trajectories into sustained contact with an individual's specific experience, organically prompting a reconsideration of key 20th-century events in the process.
How Russia Got Big
How Russia Got Big accounts for Russia's changing physical scope over some seven centuries. Even people who know little about Russia know that it is big. This concise book tells the story of how it became so. Beginning with the small principality of Moscow in the early 14th century, Paul W. Werth recounts the construction of the world's largest country-from Muscovy and the Russian Empire through the USSR to today's Russian Federation-as well as its territorial retrenchment and even collapse on several occasions. Integrating geography, diplomacy, war, and imperial politics, the book ranges across three continents and recounts diverse interactions with neighboring polities and peoples. Werth likewise contemplates different ways of conceptualizing territorial possession and related understandings of sovereignty, authority, and belonging. The result, illustrated with 29 original maps, is a grand story from a bird's-eye view that reveals deeper rhythms to Russia's territorial history involving alternations of enlargement and crisis-ones that continue in our own day.
Harry Potter in Russia
Little did newly-elected Russian President Vladimir Putin know that, as soon as he came to power, he would be sharing the spotlight with an 11-year-old British wizard. In Harry Potter in Russia, Eliot Borenstein examines the Russian Pottermania explosion in 2000 and how Harry Potter has become politicized in ways both familiar and unfamiliar to J.K. Rowling's Western fans. Borenstein reflects on how the franchise led to soul-searching about the fate of children's literature, the legitimacy and even dangers of fantasy genres, and debates about intellectual property and internet piracy. The book explores the ways in which Potter sparked moral panics about the occult, anxiety over the power of the Russian Orthodox Church, and even fears that the titular icon and his ilk were a Trojan Horse in a Western plot to corrupt Russian morals and destroy the country. Harry Potter in Russia also delves into the significance of fan fiction, parodies, cheap-knock offs, and repeated comparisons between the Boy Who Lived and the Man Who Ruled.
Plots against Russia
In this original and timely assessment of cultural expressions of paranoia in contemporary Russia, Eliot Borenstein samples popular fiction, movies, television shows, public political pronouncements, internet discussions, blogs, and religious tracts to build a sense of the deep historical and cultural roots of konspirologiia that run through Russian life. Plots against Russia reveals through dramatic and exciting storytelling that conspiracy and melodrama are entirely equal-opportunity in modern Russia, manifesting themselves among both pro-Putin elites and his political opposition. As Borenstein shows, this paranoid fantasy until recently characterized only the marginal and the irrelevant. Now, through its embodiment in pop culture, the expressions of a conspiratorial worldview are seen everywhere. Plots against Russia is an important contribution to the fields of Russian literary and cultural studies from one of its preeminent voices.
Soviet Self-Hatred
Soviet Self-Hatred examines the imaginary Russian identities that emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Eliot Borenstein shows how these identities are best understood as balanced on a simple axis between pride and shame, shifting in response to Russia's standing in the global community, its anxieties about internal dissension and foreign threats, and its stark socioeconomic inequalities. Through close readings of Russian fiction, films, jokes, songs, fan culture, and Internet memes, Borenstein identifies and analyzes four distinct types with which Russians identify or project onto others. They are the sovok (the Soviet yokel); the New Russian (the despised, ridiculous nouveau riche), the vatnik (the belligerent, jingoistic patriot), and the Orc (the ultraviolent savage derived from a deliberate misreading of Tolkien's epic). Through these contested identities, Soviet Self-Hatred shows how stories people tell about themselves can, tragically, become the stories that others are forced to live.
Intent to Destroy
'A masterpiece' Peter Pomerantsev 'Powerful' Serhii Plokhy 'Fascinating' Daily Telegraph A history of Russian violence waged against Ukraine across the centuries. Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. And yet this attack was in fact the latest episode in a centuries-long Russian campaign. In Intent to Destroy, leading scholar of genocide and Eastern Europe Eugene Finkel uncovers the deep roots of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Ever since the rise of Russian nationalism in the nineteenth century, the domination of this key borderland has become a cornerstone of Russian and Soviet policy. Using genocidal tactics - killings, deportations, starvation and cultural dest...
Pride and Panic
Russian cinema's re-imagining of the West in the post-Soviet present.
Overkill
Perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union transformed every aspect of life in Russia, and as hope began to give way to pessimism, popular culture came to reflect the anxiety and despair felt by more and more Russians. Free from censorship for the first time in Russia's history, the popular culture industry (publishing, film, and television) began to disseminate works that featured increasingly explicit images and descriptions of sex and violence. In Overkill, Eliot Borenstein explores this lurid and often-disturbing cultural landscape in close, imaginative readings of such works as You're Just a Slut, My Dear! (Ty prosto shliukha, dorogaia!), a novel about sexual slavery and illegal organ ...
