Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia

Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia PDF Author: Susan K. Morrissey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139460811
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
In early twentieth-century Russia, suicide became a public act and a social phenomenon of exceptional scale, a disquieting emblem of Russia's encounter with modernity. This book draws on an extensive range of sources, from judicial records to the popular press, to examine the forms, meanings, and regulation of suicide from the seventeenth century to 1914, placing developments into a pan-European context. It argues against narratives of secularization that read the history of suicide as a trajectory from sin to insanity, crime to social problem, and instead focuses upon the cultural politics of self-destruction. Suicide - the act, the body, the socio-medical problem - became the site on which diverse authorities were established and contested, not just the priest or the doctor but also the sovereign, the public, and the individual. This panoramic history of modern Russia, told through the prism of suicide, rethinks the interaction between cultural forms, individual agency, and systems of governance.

Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia

Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia PDF Author: Susan K. Morrissey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139460811
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Get Book Here

Book Description
In early twentieth-century Russia, suicide became a public act and a social phenomenon of exceptional scale, a disquieting emblem of Russia's encounter with modernity. This book draws on an extensive range of sources, from judicial records to the popular press, to examine the forms, meanings, and regulation of suicide from the seventeenth century to 1914, placing developments into a pan-European context. It argues against narratives of secularization that read the history of suicide as a trajectory from sin to insanity, crime to social problem, and instead focuses upon the cultural politics of self-destruction. Suicide - the act, the body, the socio-medical problem - became the site on which diverse authorities were established and contested, not just the priest or the doctor but also the sovereign, the public, and the individual. This panoramic history of modern Russia, told through the prism of suicide, rethinks the interaction between cultural forms, individual agency, and systems of governance.

Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia

Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia PDF Author: Susan K. Morrissey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
In early twentieth-century Russia, suicide became a political act and a social problem of unprecedented scale. This is the first history of suicide in imperial Russia, and the book takes an interdisciplinary approach, examining suicide's often contested status in religion, law, science, medicine, culture, and politics.

Written in Blood

Written in Blood PDF Author: Lynn Ellen Patyk
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299312208
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
A fundamentally new interpretation of the emergence of modern terrorism, arguing that it formed in the Russian literary imagination well before any shot was fired or bomb exploded.

Lost to the Collective

Lost to the Collective PDF Author: Kenneth M. Pinnow
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801457890
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
As an act of unbridled individualism, suicide confronted the Bolshevik regime with a dilemma that challenged both its theory and its practice and helped give rise to a social science state whose primary purpose was the comprehensive and rational care of the population. Labeled a social illness and represented as a vestige of prerevolutionary culture, suicide in the 1920s raised troubling questions about individual health and agency in a socialist society, provided a catalyst for the development of new social bonds and subjective outlooks, and became a marker of the country's incomplete move toward a collectivist society. Determined to eradicate the scourge of self-destruction, the regime created a number of institutions and commissions to identify pockets of disease and foster an integrated social order. The Soviet confrontation with suicide reveals with particular force the regime's anxieties about the relationship between the state and the individual. In Lost to the Collective, Kenneth M. Pinnow suggests the compatibility of the social sciences with Bolshevik dictatorship and highlights their illusory promises of control over the everyday life of groups and individuals. The book traces the creation of national statistical studies, the course of medical debates about causation and expert knowledge, and the formation of a distinct set of practices in the Bolshevik Party and Red Army that aimed to identify the suicidal individual and establish his or her significance for the rest of society. Arguing that the Soviet regime represents a particular response to the pressures and challenges of modernity, the book examines Soviet socialism—from its intense concern with the individual to its quest to build an integrated society—as one response to the larger question of human unity.

Transcendent Love

Transcendent Love PDF Author: Leonard G. Friesen
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268079854
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
In Transcendent Love: Dostoevsky and the Search for a Global Ethic, Leonard G. Friesen ranges widely across Dostoevsky's stories, novels, journalism, notebooks, and correspondence to demonstrate how Dostoevsky engaged with ethical issues in his times and how those same issues continue to be relevant to today's ethical debates. Friesen contends that the Russian ethical voice, in particular Dostoevsky's voice, deserves careful consideration in an increasingly global discussion of moral philosophy and the ethical life. Friesen challenges the view that contemporary liberalism provides a religiously neutral foundation for a global ethic. He argues instead that Dostoevsky has much to offer when it comes to the search for a global ethic, an ethic that for Dostoevsky was necessarily grounded in a Christian concept of an active, extravagant, and transcendent love. Friesen also investigates Dostoevsky's response to those who claimed that contemporary European trends, most evident in the rising secularization of nineteenth-century society, provided a more viable foundation for a global ethic than one grounded in the One, whom Doestoevsky called simply "the Russian Christ." Throughout, Friesen captures a sense of the depth and sheer loveliness of Dostoevsky's canon.

Bolshevik Sexual Forensics

Bolshevik Sexual Forensics PDF Author: Dan Healey
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501768557
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
In an effort to modernize criminal and civil investigations, early Bolsheviks gave forensic doctors—most of whom had been trained under the tsarist regime—new authority over issues of sexuality. Revolutionaries believed that forensic medicine could provide scientific and objective solutions to sexual disorder in the new society. Bolshevik Sexual Forensics explores the institutional history of Russian and Soviet forensic medicine and examines the effects of its authority when confronting sexual disorder. Healey compares sex crime investigations from Petrograd and Sverdlovsk in the 1920s to the numerous publications by forensic doctors and psychiatrists of the prerevolutionary and early Soviet periods to illustrate the role that these specialists played. In addition, Healey presents a fascinating look at how doctors diagnosed and treated hermaphroditism, showing how Soviet physicians revolutionized the standard scientific view in these cases by taking into account individual desire. This study sheds light on unexplored radical and reactionary forces that shaped the Bolshevik "sexual revolution" as lawmakers defined new ways of seeing sexual crime and disorder. Forensic doctors struggled to interpret the replacement of the age of consent with a standard of "sexual maturity," a designation that made female sexuality a collective "resource," not part of an individual's personality. "Innocence," "experience," and virginity played a major role in the expertise doctors furnished in rape and abuse trials. Psychiatrists recoiled from the language of sexual psychology in their investigations of sex criminals. Yet in the clinic, Soviet physicians probed the desires of the two-sexed citizen, whose psychology served as the basis for a distinctly modern approach to the "erasure" of the hermaphrodite. Healey concludes that the vision of men and women as equals after a "sexual revolution" was undermined from the outset of the Soviet experiment. Law and medicine failed to protect women and girls from violence, and Soviet medicine's physiological and biological model of sexual citizenship erased the vision of sexual self-expression, especially for women. This groundbreaking study will appeal to Soviet historians and those interested in gender studies, sexuality, medicine, and forensics.

Material Culture in Russia and the USSR

Material Culture in Russia and the USSR PDF Author: Graham H. Roberts
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000184927
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Material Culture in Russia and the USSR comprises some of the most cutting-edge scholarship across anthropology, history and material and cultural studies relating to Russia and the Soviet Union, from Peter the Great to Putin.Material culture in Russia and the USSR holds a particularly important role, as the distinction between private and public spheres has at times developed in radically different ways than in many places in the more commonly studied West. With case studies covering alcohol, fashion, cinema, advertising and photography among other topics, this wide-ranging collection offers an unparalleled survey of material culture in Russia and the USSR and addresses core questions such as: what makes Russian and Soviet material culture distinctive; who produces it; what values it portrays; and how it relates to 'high culture' and consumer culture.

The Routledge History of Death since 1800

The Routledge History of Death since 1800 PDF Author: Peter N. Stearns
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429639848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 567

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Book Description
The Routledge History of Death Since 1800 looks at how death has been treated and dealt with in modern history – the history of the past 250 years – in a global context, through a mix of definite, often quantifiable changes and a complex, qualitative assessment of the subject. The book is divided into three parts, with the first considering major trends in death history and identifying widespread patterns of change and continuity in the material and cultural features of death since 1800. The second part turns to specifically regional experiences, and the third offers more specialized chapters on key topics in the modern history of death. Historical findings and debates feed directly into a current and prospective assessment of death, as many societies transition into patterns of ageing that will further alter the death experience and challenge modern reactions. Thus, a final chapter probes this topic, by way of introducing the links between historical experience and current trajectories, ensuring that the book gives the reader a framework for assessing the ongoing process, as well as an understanding of the past. Global in focus and linking death to a variety of major developments in modern global history, the volume is ideal for all those interested in the multifaceted history of how death is dealt with in different societies over time and who want access to the rich and growing historiography on the subject. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Gender and Citizenship in Historical and Transnational Perspective

Gender and Citizenship in Historical and Transnational Perspective PDF Author: Anne Epstein
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137497769
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
With gender as its central focus, this book offers a transnational, multi-faceted understanding of citizenship as legislated, imagined, and exercised since the late eighteenth century. Framed around three crosscutting themes - agency, space and borders - leading scholars demonstrate what historians can bring to the study of citizenship and its evolving relationship with the theory and practice of democracy, and how we can make the concept of citizenship operational for studying past societies and cultures. The essays examine the past interactions of women and men with public authorities, their participation in civic life within various kinds of polities and the meanings they attached to their actions. In analyzing the way gender operated both to promote and to inhibit civic consciousness, action, and practice, this book advances our knowledge about the history of citizenship and the evolution of the modern state.

Petersburg Fin de Siècle

Petersburg Fin de Siècle PDF Author: Mark D. Steinberg
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300165706
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
The final decade of the old order in imperial Russia was a time of both crisis and possibility, an uncertain time that inspired an often desperate search for meaning. This book explores how journalists and other writers in St. Petersburg described and interpreted the troubled years between the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917.Mark Steinberg, distinguished historian of Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examines the work of writers of all kinds, from anonymous journalists to well-known public intellectuals, from secular liberals to religious conservatives. Though diverse in their perspectives, these urban writers were remarkably consistent in the worries they expressed. They grappled with the impact of technological and material progress on the one hand, and with an ever-deepening anxiety and pessimism on the other. Steinberg reveals a new, darker perspective on the history of St. Petersburg on the eve of revolution and presents a fresh view of Russia's experience of modernity.