The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture (Cambridge Companions to Culture) [Paperback]

Nicholas Rzhevsky (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0521477999 | ISBN-13: 978-0521477994

This volume offers an introduction to Russian culture in all its rich diversity, including the historical conditions that helped shape it and the arts that express its highest achievements. Newly commissioned essays by leading scholars explore language, religion, geography, ideological structures, folk ethos and popular culture, literature, music, theater, art, and film. A chronology and guides to further reading are also provided. Overall, the volume reveals, for students, scholars and all those interested in Russia, the dilemmas, strengths, and complexities of the Russian cultural experience.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The Companion is a useful tool... It provides neat introductions to the familiar faces and movements in Russian artistic history..." Susan Costanzo, H-Net Reviews

"...these wide-ranging and stimulating essays synthesize modern scholarship, provide useful material for the specialist, and serve as a helpful reference work for the reader already familiar with modern Russian culture." Robert C. Williams, Slavic Review

"[The book] will be utterly useful and enjoyable for students and individuals with advanced knowledge of Russia as well as for Slavic scholars." Victoria Richter, Slavic and East European Journal

Book Description

This volume offers an introduction to Russian culture in all its rich diversity, including the historical conditions that helped shape it and the arts that express its highest achievements. Newly commissioned essays by leading scholars explore language, religion, geography, ideological structures, folk ethos and popular culture, literature, music, theatre, art, and film. A chronology and guides to further reading are also provided. Overall, the volume reveals, for students, scholars and all those interested in Russia, the dilemmas, strengths, and complexities of the Russian cultural experience.

Product Details

• Paperback: 404 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (February 28, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521477999
• ISBN-13: 978-0521477994
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #114,052 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #73 in Books > History > Europe > Eastern
  • #75 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Russian

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ROOTS AND FLOWERS, September 25, 2000

By 

ivan zassoursky (Albany, NY, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture (Cambridge Companions to Culture) (Paperback)

This book is comprised of 12 brief, well-written essays by distinguished researchers, put together by the SUNY Stony Brook professor Nicolas Rzhevsky. The volume is divided into two parts: Cultural Identity and Literature and the Arts. If the first part of the book deals with Russian roots, the second is devoted to the flowers of this civilization.

On the crossroads of these narratives we see a vast land, stretching from East to West emerging from the union of Slavs and Vikings somewhere around the middle of the eighth century as a number of relatively small cities and tribes. Locked in the never-ending war with nomads prince Vladimir tries to unite them around Kiev. In his first attempt he tried to use paganism. He builds up a gallery of local pagan gods, trying to achieve some kind of union and establish certain hierarchy on the symbolic level. Seeing the futility of these attempts, however, he drops pagan faith altogether and adopts Byzantine (`Orthodox') Christianity, which is not dependent on local gods.

As we learn from the essay on Religion by the leading Russian Academician Dmitry Lihachev, having a choice among Islam and other versions of Christianity Vladimir chooses Christianity for the beauty of Byzantine rites and rituals. It is by the beauty of religious acts that God was introduced to the Russian land and the remaining ancient churches testify that because of the beauty God stayed. Church became the place where artists could realize themselves as architects and painters. Christianity also brings a new alphabet. It to this epoch that the first known texts date back.

The ensuing unity enables Kiev to achieve a number of important victories in the wars with nomads. However, Kievan Russia was not strong enough to withstand the Mongol invasion from 1237 to 1240, when Kiev was burned. It became a part of the Golden Horde on a par with Greeks, Poles, Georgians, Armenians, Mordvinians and other peoples. In fact, churches were among the few institutions that withstood the invasion and secured the identity of the Russian land, because pagan Mongols respected all kinds of gods `just in case'.

It is by the boundaries with the West and the East (which included all the Southern people, pagans and Christians alike). While West equated civilization, East was considered a territory for conquest and expansion. It is tempting to see eastward Russian expansion as a mirror of the westward colonization of the North American continent. Indeed in California and Alaska American and Russian settlers meet. It is also important to note that some of the colonizers were fuelled by religious passions over the conflict of starovery (old-believers) with the official reform of the Church by Peter the Emperor. Starovery did not accept the reform of religious rites and were prosecuted heavily by the state and church alike. They found their freedom on the frontier of Russian colonization. By the conquest of `East' Russia eventually established itself as a Western power, and in the East it was the cultural baggage of the West. The unavoidable mix of East and West inside Russia explains well enough the repercussions of identity crisis that Russia slips into from time to time. These boundaries thus limit both the territories of the Russian state and, to a large extent mark the field of intellectual debate.

It is not these grand narratives, however, that make this book so exciting, but the amount of details and `small stories' packed into the 372 pages of this volume. It is impossible to do them justice in the newspaper article. We still need books for that.

There is a wonderful essay on Russian popular culture by Catriona Kelly of Oxford University. In the Soviet-era textbooks, the lower classes were roughly defined by their dvoeverie ("double-faith"), the prominent retention of pagan beliefs alongside their commitment to Christian faith. Instead of dvoeverie, argues Kelly, we should use the term mnogoverie because pagan beliefs do not form a coherent system and thus, combined with Christianity, they produce plural belief systems. Going to the roots of the local obychai (customs), she uncovers an underworld of traditions, habits and superstitions that somehow influence the attitudes of Russian people up to this day. They may be charming and unique like domovoj (house spirit) or leshij (forest spirit), or frightening and commonplace like the fear of the `Other' and criminal counter-culture. Some of the genres and themes of the oral culture prospered during the Soviet era like chastushka - a four-line ditty of humorous or scabrous nature, but its triumph was short-lived compared to anecdote that conquered the Internet. Actually anecdote is the strongest genre of the Russian oral culture that helped to communicate the most important means of resistance against the enormous power of the Soviet state: laugh. The anecdotes are not limited to political topics, though - they actually deal with every field of human existence.

The part of the book devoted to art is as thorough, interesting and profound as the part dealing with the roots of Russian cultural identity. For example, in Russian society the written word was carefully scrutinized by the church and state, Bethea asserts that the writer in general and the poet in particular became secular saints and, very often, a martyr or suffering "holy fool". Other essays of the second part of "Modern Russian Culture" deal with Russian art, music, theater, and film.

If culture and arts provide the antidote to the shallow political language, then "Modern Russian Culture" is certainly one of the best means to overcome stereotypes and misconceptions constructed by the modern political spectacle.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great overview, April 7, 2011

By 

Irina Volchansky - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture (Cambridge Companions to Culture) (Paperback)

great overview of modern Russian culture - would recommend this to anyone wishing to get a comprehensive knowledge of the topic in a succinct amt of time