Suchergebnisse

Work Flows investigates the emergence of "flow" as a crucial metaphor within Russian labor culture since 1870. Maya Vinokour frames concern with fluid channeling as immanent to vertical power structures—whether that verticality derives from the state, as in Stalin's Soviet Union and present-day Russia, or from the proliferation of corporate monopolies, as in the contemporary Anglo-American West. Originating in pre-revolutionary bio-utopianism, the Russian rhetoric of liquids and flow reached an apotheosis during Stalin's First Five-Year Plan and re-emerged in post-Soviet "managed democracy" and Western neoliberalism.The literary, philosophical, and official texts that Work Flows examines give voice to the Stalinist ambition of reforging not merely individual bodies, but space and time themselves. By mobilizing the understudied thematic of fluidity, Vinokour offers insight into the nexus of philosophy, literature, and science that underpinned Stalinism and remains influential today. Work Flows demonstrates that Stalinism is not a historical phenomenon restricted to the period 1922-1953, but a symptom of modernity as it emerged in the twentieth century. Stalinism's legacy extends far beyond the bounds of the former Soviet Union, emerging in seemingly disparate settings like post-Soviet Russia and Silicon Valley

The Soviet 1920s and '30s saw heated debate around the issue of laughter, with writers and political actors alike asking, should the Soviet person laugh at all, and if so, how? This article considers the birth of Soviet laughter as reflected in Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov's popular satirical novels,The Twelve Chairs(1928) andThe Golden Calf(1931). I argue that Il'f and Petrov's relatively consistent critical unassailability throughout the Soviet period rests on two techniques. First, they acknowledge trauma without dwelling on it—it is always already in the past, with dramatic focus placed instead on the socialist future. Second, they encourage collective, outward-oriented laughter, stimulating Soviet citizens to unite themselves against the possible enemies of socialism. Thus, despite its inclusion of some subversive elements (like the ideologically volatile trickster Ostap Bender), Il'f and Petrov's satire was at the vanguard of what became official literary ideology.

This volume investigates energy as a shaping force in Russian and Soviet literature, visual culture, and social practice. Chronologically arranged chapters explain how nineteenth-century ideas about energy informed realist novels and paintings; how the poetics of energy defined pre-Revolutionary and Stalinist utopianism; and how fossil fuels, electricity, and nuclear fission generated distinct aesthetic features in Imperial Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet literature, cinema, and landscape. The volumes concentration on Russia responds to a clear need to understand the role the country plays in social, political, and economic processes endangering life on Earth today. The cultural dimension of Russias efforts at energy dominance deserves increased scholarly attention not only in its own right, but also because it directly affects global energy policy. As the contributors to this volume argue, the nationally inflected cultural myths that underlie human engagements with energy have been highly consequential in the Anthropocene. Jillian Porter is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. She is the author of Economies of Feeling: Russian Literature under Nicholas I (2017) and has published essays on money, commodities, and the queue in Russian and Soviet literature and cinema. Maya Vinokour is Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, USA. She studies Stalinist labor culture, late-Soviet science fiction, and post-Soviet media.