Soviet materialities : socialist things, environments and affects / edited by Mollie Arbuthnot, Christianna Bonin and Gabriella A. Ferrari.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Arbuthnot, Mollie.

Contributor:

Arbuthnot

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Material culture--Soviet Union.

Material culture.

Soviet Union.

Soviet Union--Social life and customs.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource : digital file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Manchester, UK : Manchester University Press, 2026.

Language Note:

In English.

System Details:

data file

Biography/History:

<b>Mollie Arbuthnot</b> is Assistant Professor of History at Nazarbayev University.

<b>Christianna Bonin</b> is Assistant Professor of Art History and Theory at American University of Sharjah.

<b>Gabriella A. Ferrari</b> is an independent scholar of Russian and Soviet visual culture.

Summary:

Soviet materialities explores how material transforms our understanding of Soviet culture, from the textures of domestic space in 1960s apartment blocks to Gulag labour on the Moscow canal, and from avant-garde literary theory in the 1920s to conceptual art under perestroika.It starts from the ethos that the material world shapes people and society.Taking a material approach--or a range of material approaches--can therefore illuminate aspects of the cultural production and lived experiences of Soviet socialism that are not reflected in other kinds of historical records.This edited volume brings cutting-edge research by emerging scholars together with the established voices who have broken the ground in this sub-field over the last twenty years and promises to make a major intervention in the study of Soviet history and culture. -- .

Contents:

Front Matter

Contents

List of colour plates

List of figures

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

Notes

Introduction

Part I: Land, Water, Ecologies

'And stones speak!': mapping, mosaics, and the Soviet materiality of wonder

Moving matters: Turksib and its orientations

Seas of material residues, or diving into the wayward archive of the Moscow Canal

Embodied nature: landscape as architecture during the Thaw

Reflection: The materialism of Soviet stones, liquids, and landscapes

Part II: Words, Matter, Mind

The livingness of texts in Vladimir Sorokin and Dmitrii Prigov's literature and performance art

Kruchenykh's explosive texts: elemental anarchy in the gelatine press and the gelatine bomb

Formalists

The vanishing brains of the Soviet Pantheon and the vexing question of the materiality of Soviet subjects

Reflection: Wordy things, thingly signs, and other points of transfer

Part III: Things in Time

A building containing the universe: atheism and material heritage in late Soviet Tashkent

Things of life in times of extremes: survival materialities during the Soviet famines in Ukraine

How did material culture matter in the Khrushchev-era USSR? Everyday aesthetics and the socialist culture of things

Reprocessing and resurfacing reality: reworking the everyday and the avant-garde in the artistic laboratory of Irina Nakhova

Reflection: One does not kiss a monument of ancient art: Russian Orthodox icons and the abducted materiality of modernity

Select bibliography

Index

Plates.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

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Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

1-5261-8211-4

1-5261-8213-0

9781526182111

OCLC:

1584464161