All Russia Is Burning! A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia

Our view of the cultural situation in late imperial Russia is changing. Long set aside as a distinct period in literary and cultural history, the decades embracing the turn of the twentieth century have customarily been described according to two master narratives. The first has tied developments in cultural life to the political struggle between revolution and reaction, and to the history of Russian revolutionary ideology. The second focuses on the evolution of style, recounting the transformation of realism and the concurrent emergence of decadence and modernism. Recent scholarship, however, has begun to reveal the limits of these paradigms by directing attention to fundamental changes in the institutions of Russian literature. Jeffrey Brooks has shown how the Russian reading public expanded and diversified in the wake of the Great Reforms, thus preparing the way for a broadly based popular literature governed by market forces. As technology improved in the areas of printing, transportation and communications, the potential of this new market was increasingly exploited so that by the turn of the century popular literature had risen from its origins as a virtual cottage enterprise to the status of a major industry.

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Reviews of Books:All Russia Is Burning! A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia Cathy A. Frierson

The American Historical Review ◽

10.1086/530314 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 109 (1) ◽

pp. 284-285

Author(s):

Christine D. Worobec

Keyword(s):

Cultural History ◽

Late Imperial ◽

Imperial Russia ◽

History Of

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Benjamin Nathans. Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. (Studies on the History of Society and Culture, number 45.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2002, Pp. xvii, 424. $54.95

The American Historical Review ◽

10.1086/ahr/108.4.1251 ◽

2003 ◽

Keyword(s):

Los Angeles ◽

University Of California ◽

Late Imperial ◽

Imperial Russia ◽

History Of

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NEW SCIENTIFIC WORKS ON THE MODERN BELARUSIAN AND POLISH HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE HISTORY OF THE LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA AND THE SOVIET STATE

Istoriya: Informatsionno-analiticheskii Zhurnal ◽

10.31249/rhist/2021.04.05 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 76-88

Author(s):

Oksana Babenko ◽

Keyword(s):

Prisoners Of War ◽

Academic Science ◽

Soviet State ◽

Late Imperial ◽

Imperial Russia ◽

Initial Stage ◽

Red Army ◽

History Of ◽

The Russian Empire ◽

The Military

The review presents new publications on the Belarusian and the Polish historiographies of the history of the late Imperial Russia and the Soviet State. Such problems as the number and conditions of detention of foreign prisoners of war in the Belarusian territories of the Russian Empire during the First World War, the influence of the military conflicts of 1914-1921 on the identity of the inhabitants of the Belarusian lands, the initial stage of the formation of academic science in the BSSR, the question of the «invasion» of Poland by the Red Army in September 1939 are highlighted.

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Between Arcadia and Suburbia: Dachas in Late Imperial Russia

Slavic Review ◽

10.2307/2696983 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 61 (1) ◽

pp. 66-87 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Stephen Lovell

Keyword(s):

Middle Class ◽

Urban Development ◽

Urban Culture ◽

Middle Income ◽

Late Imperial ◽

Imperial Russia ◽

Country Life ◽

History Of ◽

Middle Strata ◽

Urban Civilization

In the last few prerevolutionary decades, dachas (summer houses) became an amenity accessible to wide sections of the population of Russia’s two main cities. Dachas offered middle-income urbanites unprecedented scope to free themselves from the workplace, cultivate new lifestyles, and create new communities and subcultures. Dachas thus constitute an important element in the history of late imperial leisure, entertainment, consumption, everyday life, and urban development. They also illustrate the complexity and hybridity of urban culture in this period. The dacha public was diverse in its tastes and sociocultural allegiances; it blended the intelligentsia’s commitment to the simple country life with a more “petit bourgeois” interest in diversion and domestic comfort. As an isolated bridgehead of urban civilization in an undercivilized rural hinterland, the dacha provides an important focus for discussing the middle strata of Moscow and St. Petersburg. If the tag “middle-class” could be applied to anyone in late imperial Russia, it was to the dachniki.

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