Voicing the Soviet Experience

Voicing the Soviet Experience PDF Author: Katharine Hodgson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780197262894
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This is a long overdue examination of a poet whose career offers a case study in the complexities facing Soviet writers in the Stalin era. Ol'ga Berggol'ts (1910-1975) was a prominent Russian Soviet poet, whose accounts of heroism in wartime Leningrad brought her fame. This volume addresses her position as a writer whose Party loyalties were frequently in conflict with the demands of artistic and personal integrity. Writers who pursued their careers under the restrictions of the Stalin era have been categorized as 'official' figures whose work is assumed to be drab, inept, and opportunistic; but such assumptions impose a uniformity on the work of Soviet writers that the censors and the Writers Union could not achieve. An exploration of Berggol'ts's work shows that the borders between 'official' and 'unofficial' literature were in fact permeable and shifting. This book draws on unpublished sources such as diaries and notebooks to reveal the range and scope of her work, and to show how conflict and ambiguity functioned as a creative structuring principle. Dr Hodgson discusses how Berggol'ts's lyric poetry constructs the subject from multiple, conflicting discourses, and examines the poet's treatment of genres such as narrative verse, verse tragedy, and prose in the changing cultural context of the 1950s. Berggol'ts's use of inter-textual, and especially intra-textual, reference is also investigated; the intensively self-referential nature of her work creates a web of allusion which connects texts of different genres, 'official' as well as 'unofficial' writing. This study will provoke readers into reassessing the cultural heritage of an era that can seem remote and impenetrable, but which (like Ol'ga Berggol'ts) was far more complex and intriguing.

Voicing the Soviet Experience

Voicing the Soviet Experience PDF Author: Katharine Hodgson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780197262894
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This is a long overdue examination of a poet whose career offers a case study in the complexities facing Soviet writers in the Stalin era. Ol'ga Berggol'ts (1910-1975) was a prominent Russian Soviet poet, whose accounts of heroism in wartime Leningrad brought her fame. This volume addresses her position as a writer whose Party loyalties were frequently in conflict with the demands of artistic and personal integrity. Writers who pursued their careers under the restrictions of the Stalin era have been categorized as 'official' figures whose work is assumed to be drab, inept, and opportunistic; but such assumptions impose a uniformity on the work of Soviet writers that the censors and the Writers Union could not achieve. An exploration of Berggol'ts's work shows that the borders between 'official' and 'unofficial' literature were in fact permeable and shifting. This book draws on unpublished sources such as diaries and notebooks to reveal the range and scope of her work, and to show how conflict and ambiguity functioned as a creative structuring principle. Dr Hodgson discusses how Berggol'ts's lyric poetry constructs the subject from multiple, conflicting discourses, and examines the poet's treatment of genres such as narrative verse, verse tragedy, and prose in the changing cultural context of the 1950s. Berggol'ts's use of inter-textual, and especially intra-textual, reference is also investigated; the intensively self-referential nature of her work creates a web of allusion which connects texts of different genres, 'official' as well as 'unofficial' writing. This study will provoke readers into reassessing the cultural heritage of an era that can seem remote and impenetrable, but which (like Ol'ga Berggol'ts) was far more complex and intriguing.

Voices of the Soviet Space Program

Voices of the Soviet Space Program PDF Author: S. Gerovitch
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113748179X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
In this remarkable oral history, Slava Gerovitch presents interviews with the men and women who witnessed Soviet space efforts firsthand. Rather than comprising a "master narrative," these fascinating and varied accounts bring to light the often divergent perspectives, experiences, and institutional cultures that defined the Soviet space program.

Voices from the Soviet Edge

Voices from the Soviet Edge PDF Author: Jeff Sahadeo
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501738216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Jeff Sahadeo reveals the complex and fascinating stories of migrant populations in Leningrad and Moscow. Voices from the Soviet Edge focuses on the hundreds of thousands of Uzbeks, Tajiks, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, and others who arrived toward the end of the Soviet era, seeking opportunity at the privileged heart of the USSR. Through the extensive oral histories Sahadeo has collected, he shows how the energy of these migrants, denigrated as "Blacks" by some Russians, transformed their families' lives and created inter-republican networks, altering society and community in both the center and the periphery of life in the "two capitals." Voices from the Soviet Edge connects Leningrad and Moscow to transnational trends of core-periphery movement and marks them as global cities. In examining Soviet concepts such as "friendship of peoples" alongside ethnic and national differences, Sahadeo shows how those ideas became racialized but could also be deployed to advance migrant aspirations. He exposes the Brezhnev era as a time of dynamism and opportunity, and Leningrad and Moscow not as isolated outposts of privilege but at the heart of any number of systems that linked the disparate regions of the USSR into a whole. In the 1980s, as the Soviet Union crumbled, migration increased. These later migrants were the forbears of contemporary Muslims from former Soviet spaces who now confront significant discrimination in European Russia. As Sahadeo demonstrates, the two cities benefited from 1980s' migration but also became communities where racism and exclusion coexisted with citizenship and Soviet identity.

Gulag Voices

Gulag Voices PDF Author: J. Gheith
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780230610620
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this volume, the powerful voices of Gulag survivors become accessible to English-speaking audiences for the first time through oral histories, rather than written memoirs. It brings together interviews with men and women, members of the working class and intelligentsia, people who live in the major cities and those from the "provinces," and from an array of corrective hard labor camps and prisons across the former Soviet Union. Its aims are threefold: 1) to give a sense of the range of the Gulag experience and its consequences for Russian society; 2) to make the Gulag relevant to English-speaking readers by offering comparisons to historical catastrophes they are likely to know more about, such as the Holocaust; and 3) to discuss issues of oral history and memory in the cultural context of Soviet and post-Soviet society.

Voices from the Vietnam War

Voices from the Vietnam War PDF Author: Xiaobing Li
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813173868
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
The Vietnam War's influence on politics, foreign policy, and subsequent military campaigns is the center of much debate and analysis. But the impact on veterans across the globe, as well as the war's effects on individual lives and communities, is a largely neglected issue. As a consequence of cultural and legal barriers, the oral histories of the Vietnam War currently available in English are predictably one-sided, providing limited insight into the inner workings of the Communist nations that participated in the war. Furthermore, many of these accounts focus on combat experiences rather than the backgrounds, belief systems, and social experiences of interviewees, resulting in an incomplete historiography of the war. Chinese native Xiaobing Li corrects this oversight in Voices from the Vietnam War: Stories from American, Asian, and Russian Veterans. Li spent seven years gathering hundreds of personal accounts from survivors of the war, accounts that span continents, nationalities, and political affiliations. The twenty-two intimate stories in the book feature the experiences of American, Chinese, Russian, Korean, and North and South Vietnamese veterans, representing the views of both anti-Communist and Communist participants, including Chinese officers of the PLA, a Russian missile-training instructor, and a KGB spy. These narratives humanize and contextualize the war's events while shedding light on aspects of the war previously unknown to Western scholars. Providing fresh perspectives on a long-discussed topic, Voices from the Vietnam War offers a thorough and unique understanding of America's longest war.

Gulag Voices

Gulag Voices PDF Author: J. Gheith
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230116280
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
In this volume, the powerful voices of Gulag survivors become accessible to English-speaking audiences for the first time through oral histories, rather than written memoirs. It brings together interviews with men and women, members of the working class and intelligentsia, people who live in the major cities and those from the "provinces," and from an array of corrective hard labor camps and prisons across the former Soviet Union. Its aims are threefold: 1) to give a sense of the range of the Gulag experience and its consequences for Russian society; 2) to make the Gulag relevant to English-speaking readers by offering comparisons to historical catastrophes they are likely to know more about, such as the Holocaust; and 3) to discuss issues of oral history and memory in the cultural context of Soviet and post-Soviet society.

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.

Voices from Chernobyl

Voices from Chernobyl PDF Author: Светлана Алексиевич
Publisher: White Lion Publishing
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award A journalist by trade, who now suffers from an immune deficiency developed while researching this book, presents personal accounts of what happened to the people of Belarus after the nuclear reactor accident in 1986, and the fear, anger, and uncertainty that they still live with. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."

Voices from the Soviet Edge

Voices from the Soviet Edge PDF Author: Jeff Sahadeo
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501738224
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Jeff Sahadeo reveals the complex and fascinating stories of migrant populations in Leningrad and Moscow. Voices from the Soviet Edge focuses on the hundreds of thousands of Uzbeks, Tajiks, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, and others who arrived toward the end of the Soviet era, seeking opportunity at the privileged heart of the USSR. Through the extensive oral histories Sahadeo has collected, he shows how the energy of these migrants, denigrated as "Blacks" by some Russians, transformed their families' lives and created inter-republican networks, altering society and community in both the center and the periphery of life in the "two capitals." Voices from the Soviet Edge connects Leningrad and Moscow to transnational trends of core-periphery movement and marks them as global cities. In examining Soviet concepts such as "friendship of peoples" alongside ethnic and national differences, Sahadeo shows how those ideas became racialized but could also be deployed to advance migrant aspirations. He exposes the Brezhnev era as a time of dynamism and opportunity, and Leningrad and Moscow not as isolated outposts of privilege but at the heart of any number of systems that linked the disparate regions of the USSR into a whole. In the 1980s, as the Soviet Union crumbled, migration increased. These later migrants were the forbears of contemporary Muslims from former Soviet spaces who now confront significant discrimination in European Russia. As Sahadeo demonstrates, the two cities benefited from 1980s' migration but also became communities where racism and exclusion coexisted with citizenship and Soviet identity.

Rethinking the Soviet Experience

Rethinking the Soviet Experience PDF Author: Stephen F. Cohen
Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195040163
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Written in 1985, this book cuts through the Cold War stereotypes of the Soviet Union to arrive at fresh interpretations of that country's traumatic history and later political realities. The author probes Soviet history, society, and politics to explain how the U.S.S.R. remained stable from revolution through the mid-1980s.