Stalin. Passage to Revolution

Abstract

exchange between high and popular cultures was multidirectional, even within Russia’s highly stratified society. Innovations by artistic elites coloured the work of the newly literate, but folk and oral cultures were hugely influential on those revered for their contributions to high culture. Not only were high, middle and popular cultures in constant interaction with one another, but the interplay between them was central to the creative process. This examination of the ecosystem is particularly fruitful in chapter 3 on post-Emancipation visual culture, in which Brooks masterfully explores the contributions of the Wanderers and illustrators of cheap masscirculation (‘thin’) magazines to cultural conversations side by side. Brooks’s sensitivity to the interactions between the social, the cultural and the political makes him attuned to the anxieties related to gender that were in broad circulation amid industrialisation, urbanisation and modernisation. Brooks explores the tensions surrounding the disruption of the traditional gender order in the late nineteenth century through depictions of the vixen in popular culture, the female protagonists in the novels of Lev Tolstoy, and fantasies of male domination in The Rite of Spring. Therefore, it is disappointing that Brooks’s astuteness in analysing gendered representations does not extend across the revolutionary divide, as the New Soviet Woman and her emergence as both a protagonist (and antagonist) in the early 1920s is absent from discussions of the Soviet era. Relatedly, an analysis of sexuality does not feature in Brooks’s study. As Laura Engelstein, Dan Healey, Alison Rowley and others have shown, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, discussions and visions of sexuality reverberated across Russia’s increasingly noisy public sphere. New technologies like photography and the falling printing costs coincided with the commodification of bodies and proliferation of sexualized images in high and popular visual culture. Acknowledging these trends would have added further nuance to Brooks’s discussions of gender and power in fin-de-siècle Russia. These issues aside, The Firebird and the Fox is a rigorous and highly engaging study that brings Russian culture to life. This book was a pleasure to read and will be of interest to scholars and students of modern Russian history.