{"title":"Putinism – Post‐Soviet Regime Ideology by Mikhail Suslov. BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies. London: Routledge, 2024. 286 pp. £36.00. ISBN 978‐1‐0321‐5388‐9","authors":"Neil Robinson","doi":"10.1111/russ.12687","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.12687","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":83255,"journal":{"name":"The Russian review","volume":"84 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141926530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Woman’s Empire: Russian Women and Imperial Expansion in Asia by Katya Hokanson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023. x + 344 pp. $80.00. ISBN 978‐1‐4875‐4560‐4","authors":"Sibelan Forrester","doi":"10.1111/russ.12652","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.12652","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":83255,"journal":{"name":"The Russian review","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141111247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Russia’s Turkish War: The Tsarist Army and the Balkan Peoples in the Nineteenth Century by VictorTaki. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2024. 306 pp. $95.00. ISBN 978‐1‐4875‐0163‐1","authors":"R. Reese","doi":"10.1111/russ.12651","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.12651","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":83255,"journal":{"name":"The Russian review","volume":"22 24","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141120629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Metabolic Modernities: Digestion, Energy Transformations, and the Making and Unmaking of the World in Early Soviet Literature","authors":"E. Fratto","doi":"10.1111/russ.12648","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.12648","url":null,"abstract":"Early Soviet society featured clear nutrition guidelines and a robust plan for streamlined logistics in food processing, distribution, and consumption, all of which was aimed at building a stronger state through a virtuous transformation of calories into labor power. Such rhetoric appeared even in children’s illustrated books, such as Vladimir Maiakovskii and Nikolai Kupreianov’s Story of Petia, Fat Boy, and of Sima, Who is Skinny (1926). This paper shows how in the 1920s authors such as Viktor Shklovskii and Iurii Olesha turned that rhetoric on its head and pushed back against the early Soviet obsession with planning and mastering nature and the human body by employing metaphors of food, digestion, and agriculture. In Shklovskii’s memoirs A Sentimental Journey (1923) and Knight’s Move (1923) and Olesha’s novel Envy (1927), the October Revolution itself emerges as a metabolic process on a vast scale: prerevolutionary aesthetic threads, motifs, and concepts are broken down and processed, reassembled, and repurposed into a seemingly new society and worldview, in which the individual original components are still recognizable.","PeriodicalId":83255,"journal":{"name":"The Russian review","volume":"30 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141124006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Perception of Surroundings: Materiality and Affect in the Russian Kustar Arts Revival","authors":"Colleen McQuillen","doi":"10.1111/russ.12647","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.12647","url":null,"abstract":"Abramtsevo and Talashkino are well known for their handicraft workshops that participated in the revival of Russian folk arts known as kustarnichestvo at the turn of the last century. Typically examined in terms of its stylistic progenitors or as a manifestation of Russia’s nationalist politics, kustarnichestvo can also offer unique insights into how craftspeople and consumers related to their natural and built environments. This article examines the materiality of kustar art objects from two perspectives: first, it turns to forests and woodlands as a source of natural resources and ornamental inspiration; then it tackles narratives about how the resulting neo‐Russian style interiors produced a distinctive kind of affect in their beholders. By showing how human subjects understood themselves to be enmeshed in natural and affective ecologies at the fin de siècle, it argues that a movement thoroughly grounded in materialist concerns paradoxically gave rise to a new understanding of the perceiving subject’s affective experience.","PeriodicalId":83255,"journal":{"name":"The Russian review","volume":"113 33","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141125883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Invasive Species: Immunity and Community in Contemporary Outbreak Narratives","authors":"Julia Vaingurt","doi":"10.1111/russ.12649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.12649","url":null,"abstract":"The word contagion, derived from Latin contagio, the combination of con (“together with”) and tagio (“touch”), suggests a close relationship between the human body and community. It stands to reason, then, that contagion narratives in one way or the other attempt to reflect upon one’s being in the world, with others, whether human or non‐human, and they do so through the theme of communicable disease and shared physical vulnerability. In the last couple of decades, Russian literature has witnessed an uptick in outbreak narratives fueled by anxieties over globalization and the ever‐shrinking distances and ever‐increasing mobility of our “global village.” The paper analyzes two of such recent novels, Vladimir Sorokin’s The Blizzard (2010) and Eduard Verkin’s Sakhalin Island (2018), to examine whether these developments lead the authors to conceptualize new forms of community and communality or, on the contrary, retreat into nostalgic restoration, nationalism, and tribalism.","PeriodicalId":83255,"journal":{"name":"The Russian review","volume":"24 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140966809","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Slum Bodies: Leo Tolstoy’s What Should We Do Then?, the Moscow Poor, and Late Nineteenth‐Century Russian Slum Literature","authors":"Riccardo Nicolosi","doi":"10.1111/russ.12646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.12646","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes Tolstoy’s narrative on the Moscow poor in What Should We Do Then? in the context of the tradition of slum literature in late nineteenth‐century Russia. It focuses on the interplay between the human body and the environment in a literary tradition that is heavily influenced by the biomedical discourse of degeneration. It compares then the slum discourse with Tolstoy’s representation of the poor. The argument is that Tolstoy recalls some elements of this discourse with the intention of distancing himself from it and proposing a new perspective on the slum reality. Tolstoy attempts to individualize and differentiate what may initially seem like an amorphous, threatening human mass, in order to highlight the anthropological normality of slum space and its dwellers. This aligns with his philanthropic program based on mutual love between rich and poor. However, his normalization and differentiation strategies eventually collapse due to the persistence of a threatening bodily otherness within the slums. The ultimate failure of Tolstoy’s “naïve” plan for social amelioration is manifested in the persistence of the disturbing degenerate reality of slum bodies and spaces as a mirror image of the monstrosity of society.","PeriodicalId":83255,"journal":{"name":"The Russian review","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140968864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology by ElenaKochetkova. History for a Sustainable Future. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2024. 258 pp. $40.00. ISBN 978‐0‐2625‐4745‐1","authors":"Laurent Coumel","doi":"10.1111/russ.12650","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.12650","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":83255,"journal":{"name":"The Russian review","volume":"21 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140971632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800–1880 by Anna A.Berman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 272 pp. $90.00. ISBN 978‐0‐1928‐6662‐2","authors":"Anne Hruska","doi":"10.1111/russ.12639","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.12639","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":83255,"journal":{"name":"The Russian review","volume":"112 S3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141017267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Roy and Zhores Medvedev: Loyal Dissent in the Soviet Union by BarbaraMartin. Modern Biographies. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2023. 244 pp. $149.00. ISBN 979‐8‐8871‐9181‐2","authors":"Joshua Rubenstein","doi":"10.1111/russ.12640","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.12640","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":83255,"journal":{"name":"The Russian review","volume":"145 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141015212","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}