Mass Culture in Soviet Russia

Mass Culture in Soviet Russia PDF Author: James Von Geldern
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253209696
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
This anthology offers a rich array of documents, short fiction, poems, songs, plays, movie scripts, comic routines, and folklore to offer a close look at the mass culture that was consumed by millions in Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1953. Both state-sponsored cultural forms and the unofficial culture that flourished beneath the surface are represented. The focus is on the entertainment genres that both shaped and reflected the social, political, and personal values of the regime and the masses. The period covered encompasses the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the mixed economy and culture of the 1920s, the tightly controlled Stalinist 1930s, the looser atmosphere of the Great Patriotic War, and the postwar era ending with the death of Stalin. Much of the material appears here in English for the first time. A companion 45-minute audio tape (ISBN 0-253-32911-6) features contemporaneous performances of fifteen popular songs of the time, with such favorites as "Bublichki," "The Blue Kerchief," and "Katyusha." Russian texts of the songs are included in the book.

Mass Culture in Soviet Russia

Mass Culture in Soviet Russia PDF Author: James Von Geldern
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253209696
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 548

Get Book Here

Book Description
This anthology offers a rich array of documents, short fiction, poems, songs, plays, movie scripts, comic routines, and folklore to offer a close look at the mass culture that was consumed by millions in Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1953. Both state-sponsored cultural forms and the unofficial culture that flourished beneath the surface are represented. The focus is on the entertainment genres that both shaped and reflected the social, political, and personal values of the regime and the masses. The period covered encompasses the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the mixed economy and culture of the 1920s, the tightly controlled Stalinist 1930s, the looser atmosphere of the Great Patriotic War, and the postwar era ending with the death of Stalin. Much of the material appears here in English for the first time. A companion 45-minute audio tape (ISBN 0-253-32911-6) features contemporaneous performances of fifteen popular songs of the time, with such favorites as "Bublichki," "The Blue Kerchief," and "Katyusha." Russian texts of the songs are included in the book.

Poets of the Chinese Revolution

Poets of the Chinese Revolution PDF Author: Gregor Benton
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788734688
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
How poetry and revolution meshed in Red China The Chinese Revolution, which fought its way to power seventy years ago, was a complex and protracted event in which groups and individuals with different hopes and expectations for the Revolution competed, although in the end Mao came to rule over the others. Its veterans included many poets, four of whom feature in this anthology. All wrote in the classical style, but their poetry was no less diverse than their politics. Chen Duxiu, led China’s early cultural awakening before founding the Communist Party in 1921. Mao led the Party to power in 1949. Zheng Chaolin, Chen Duxiu’s disciple and, like him, a convert to Trotskyism, spent thirty-four years in jail, first under the Nationalists and then under their Maoist nemeses. The guerrilla leader Chen Yi wrote flamboyant and descriptive poems in mountain bivouacs or the heat of battle. Poetry has played a different role in China, and in Chinese Revolution, from in the West—it is collective and collaborative. But in life, the four poets in this collection were entangled in opposition and even bitter hostility towards one another. Together, the four poets illustrate the complicated relationship between Communist revolution and Chinese cultural tradition.

Poets of Hope and Despair

Poets of Hope and Despair PDF Author: Ben Hellman
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004366814
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
an account of the response of the Russian Symbolist poets to the Great War and the Russian revolutions of 1917.

The Stray Dog Cabaret

The Stray Dog Cabaret PDF Author: Catherine Ciepiela
Publisher: NYRB Classics
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Apparently the first original publication from the New York Review imprint (exclusively a reprint house until now), this collection makes an ideally readable introduction to this sometimes forbidding, internationally admired, poetic group. Fin-de-siecle concerns of love in cafés, of sun and song, flirtation and regret, give way to darker worries as the Russian Revolution runs its course: Blok and Boris Pasternak sound particularly effective in Schmidt's libretto-like, clarified versions, while Akhmatova--grown older, immersed in sorrow--proposes a toast to the terrible world we inhabit/ And to God, who never replied. Editor Catherine Ciepela offers a long and useful introduction, along with capsule biographies of Schmidt's eight poets; poet and biographer Honor Moore adds an epilogue. --Publishers Weekly.

Voices of Revolution, 1917

Voices of Revolution, 1917 PDF Author: Mark D. Steinberg
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300090161
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
With precision and sensitivity, the human story of what the Russian revolution meant to ordinary people is told through the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of the people as expressed in their own words.

Equality and Revolution

Equality and Revolution PDF Author: Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822973758
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
On July 20, 1917, Russia became the world's first major power to grant women the right to vote and hold public office. Yet in the wake of the October Revolution later that year, the foundational organizations and individuals who pioneered the suffragist cause were all but erased from Russian history. The women's movement, when mentioned at all, is portrayed as rooted in the elitist and bourgeois culture of the tsarist era, meaningless to proletarian and peasant women, and counter to socialist ideology. Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild reveals that Russian feminists in fact appealed to all classes and were an integral force for revolution and social change, particularly during the monumental uprisings of 1905-1917. Ruthchild offers a telling examination of the social dynamics in imperialist Russia that fostered a growing feminist movement. Based upon extensive archival research in six countries, she analyzes the backgrounds, motivations, methods, activism, and organizational networks of early Russian feminists, revealing the foundations of a powerful feminist intelligentsia that came to challenge, and eventually bring down, the patriarchal tsarist regime.Ruthchild profiles the individual women (and a few men) who were vital to the feminist struggle, as well as the major conferences, publications, and organizations that promoted the cause. She documents political debates on the acceptance of women's suffrage and rights, and follows each party's attempt to woo feminist constituencies despite their fear of women gaining too much political power. Ruthchild also compares and contrasts the Russian movement to those in Britain, China, Germany, France, and the United States. Equality and Revolution offers an original and revisionist study of the struggle for women's political rights in late imperial Russia, and presents a significant reinterpretation of a decisive period of Russian-and world-history.

Earthly Signs

Earthly Signs PDF Author: Marina Tsvetaeva
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681371634
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
A moving collection of autobiographical essays from a Russian poet and refugee of the Bolshevik Revolution. Marina Tsvetaeva ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets. Her suicide at the age of forty-eight was the tragic culmination of a life buffeted by political upheaval. The essays collected in this volume are based on diaries she kept during the turbulent years of the Revolution and Civil War. In them she records conversations of women in the markets, soldiers and peasants on the train traveling from the Crimea to Moscow in October 1917, fighting in the streets of Moscow, a frantic scramble with co-workers to dig frozen potatoes out of a cellar, and poetry readings organized by a newly minted Soviet bohemia. Alone in Moscow with two small children, no income, and a missing husband, Tsvetaeva struggled to feed her daughters (one of whom died of malnutrition in an orphanage), find employment in the Soviet bureaucracy, and keep writing poetry. Her keen and ruthless eye observes with compassion and humor—bringing the social, economic, and cultural chaos of the period to life. These autobiographical writings not only give a vivid eyewitness account of Russian history but provide vital insights into the workings of Tsvetaeva’s unique poetics. Includes black and white photographs.

The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry

The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry PDF Author: Robert Chandler
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141972262
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 541

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Book Description
An enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry, edited by acclaimed translator Robert Chandler together with poets Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry's pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and his contemporaries ushering in the 'Golden Age' of Russian literature. Prose briefly gained the high ground in the second half of the nineteenth century, but poetry again became dominant in the 'Silver Age' (the early twentieth century), when belief in reason and progress yielded once more to a more magical view of the world. During the Soviet era, poetry became a dangerous, subversive activity; nevertheless, poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova continued to defy the censors. This anthology traces Russian poetry from its Golden Age to the modern era, including work by several great poets - Georgy Ivanov and Varlam Shalamov among them - in captivating modern translations by Robert Chandler and others. The volume also includes a general introduction, chronology and individual introductions to each poet. Robert Chandler is an acclaimed poet and translator. His many translations from Russian include works by Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolay Leskov, Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov, while his anthologies of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales are both published in Penguin Classics. Irina Mashinski is a bilingual poet and co-founder of the StoSvet literary project. Her most recent collection is 2013's Ophelia i masterok [Ophelia and the Trowel]. Boris Dralyuk is a Lecturer in Russian at the University of St Andrews and translator of many books from Russian, including, most recently, Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry (2014).

Mayakovsky

Mayakovsky PDF Author: Bengt Jangfeldt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022605697X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 623

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Book Description
A Life at Stake is the first serious biography of the legendary Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Physically imposing, crude, a sexual adventurer and ex-convict, Mayakovsky rose to fame between 1912 and 1917 as a Futurist agitator and the author of radical poems and plays. He embraced the Russian Revolution and became one of its most passionate propagandists, then at the age of thirty-six took his own life, disappointed in the course of Soviet society and ravaged by private conflicts. Mayakovsky s poems are as exhilarating today as when he declaimed them for friends in smoky flats in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, and New York. In Bengt Jangfeldt s propulsive biography, Mayakovsky s life, too, is compelling: a story of constant, passionate upheaval against the background of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, Stalin s terror, and cycles of anti-Semitism. Mayakovsky emerges from this biography a highly vulnerable figure, more a dreamer than a revolutionary, more a political romantic than a hardened Communist."

The Revolution of Marina M.

The Revolution of Marina M. PDF Author: Janet Fitch
Publisher: Hachette+ORM
ISBN: 0316125776
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 925

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Book Description
From the mega-bestselling author of White Oleander and Paint It Black, a sweeping historical saga of the Russian Revolution, as seen through the eyes of one young woman. St. Petersburg, New Year's Eve, 1916. Marina Makarova is a young woman of privilege who aches to break free of the constraints of her genteel life, a life about to be violently upended by the vast forces of history. Swept up on these tides, Marina will join the marches for workers' rights, fall in love with a radical young poet, and betray everything she holds dear, before being betrayed in turn. As her country goes through almost unimaginable upheaval, Marina's own coming-of-age unfolds, marked by deep passion and devastating loss, and the private heroism of an ordinary woman living through extraordinary times. This is the epic, mesmerizing story of one indomitable woman's journey through some of the most dramatic events of the last century.