Peasant Life and Russian Identity: The Plots About Peasants and Their Cultural Meaning in Russian Literature Before 1861

All mod cons ?

Canadian-American Slavic Studies ◽

10.1163/22102396-05104010 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 51 (4) ◽

pp. 459-480

Author(s):

Graham H. Roberts

Keyword(s):

Social Identity ◽

Human Nature ◽

Market Economy ◽

Russian Literature ◽

Human Values ◽

Consumer Society ◽

Russian Society ◽

Society Today ◽

Russian Identity

In our paper we propose a typology of the different ways in which the theme of consumption and the consumer society is treated in contemporary Russian literature. Some writers, of whom Oksana Robski is perhaps the best known, view consumption as something entirely positive, as a way for an individual (and especially a woman) to affirm their social identity. Others, such as Sergei Minaev and Viktor Pelevin, directly attack consumerism for the manner in which it has produced a spiritual void in Russian society today. A third group of writers, such as Zakhar Prilepin and Dmitry Bykov, criticise consumerism indirectly, by showing characters who are more or less violently opposed to the new society. Finally, novelists such as Ol’ga Slavnikova, Vladimir Sorokin and Mikhail Elizarov, do not evoke consumerism explicitly, but instead use metaphor to evoke the absence of basic human values in the new market economy. In today’s Russia, consumption has become the focus of a bitter struggle between different views of human nature, of society, and perhaps most importantly, of Russian identity itself. Nowhere is this struggle more clearly portrayed than in the pages of contemporary Russian literature.

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Without the Banya We Would Perish

10.1093/oso/9780195395488.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Ethan Pollock

Keyword(s):

Social Economic ◽

Russian Literature ◽

Everyday Lives ◽

Feature Films ◽

The Everyday ◽

Russian Identity

The story of the pervasive and resilient Russian bathhouse (banya) offers new perspectives on the evolution of Russian identity, conceptions of health and hygiene, and forms of community, sexuality, and sociability. The meanings that have formed around the banya over its thousand-year history make it a unique prism through which to understand the effects of broad social, economic, and political changes on the everyday lives of Russians and to understand how Russians have seemed at times barbaric and at times enlightened to outsiders. Sources ranging from the earliest recorded Russian chronicles to recent feature films, from municipal codes to highbrow Russian literature, illustrate the ways in which the banya, whether in Russia, in the Russian diaspora, or in the imagination of outsiders, has been a place to get clean and a space for intrigue, intimacy, violence, and sex.

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