Download or read book Preserving Petersburg written by Helena Goscilo and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008-06-13 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Goscilo and Norris’ innovative anthology provides Slavic scholars with a panoramic view of the city’s literary, pictorial and social manifestations.” —Europe-Asia Studies For more than three centuries, St. Petersburg, founded in 1703 by Peter the Great as Russia’s westward-oriented capital and as a visually stunning showcase of Russia’s imperial ambitions, has been the country’s most mythologized city. Like a museum piece, it has functioned as a site for preservation, a literal and imaginative place where Russians can commune with idealized pasts. Preserving Petersburg represents a significant departure from traditional representations. By moving beyond the “Petersburg text” created by canonized writers and artists, the contributors to this engrossing volume trace the ways in which St. Petersburg has become a “museum piece,” embodying history, nostalgia, and recourse to memories of the past. The essays in this attractively illustrated volume trace a process of preservation that stretches back nearly three centuries, as manifest in the works of noted historians, poets, novelists, artists, architects, filmmakers, and dramatists. “The collection truly sparkles as the contributors each in turn take up this snuff box of a city . . . and breathe movement and life into the idealized Petersburg museum.” —Gregory Stroud, Bennington College “This collection brings together history, literature, architecture, and the politics of memory.” —Choice “An interesting and important contribution to existing scholarship on St. Petersburg’s myth, cult, and text . . . this volume is distinctive.” —Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Columbia University “A truly innovative contribution to the scholarship on Petersburg . . . The volume should be read by all serious Slavic scholars.” —Emily Johnson, University of Oklahoma

Download or read book How St Petersburg Learned to Study Itself written by Emily D. Johnson and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2006-05-30 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the bookshops of present-day St. Petersburg, guidebooks abound. Both modern descriptions of Russia’s old imperial capital and lavish new editions of pre-Revolutionary texts sell well, primarily attracting an audience of local residents. Why do Russians read one- and two-hundred-year-old guidebooks to a city they already know well? In How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself, Emily Johnson traces the Russian fascination with local guides to the idea of kraevedenie. Kraevedenie (local studies) is a disciplinary tradition that in Russia dates back to the early twentieth century. Practitioners of kraevedenie investigate local areas, study the ways human society and the environment affect each other, and decipher the semiotics of space. They deconstruct urban myths, analyze the conventions governing the depiction of specific regions and towns in works of art and literature, and dissect both outsider and insider perceptions of local population groups. Practitioners of kraevedenie helped develop and popularize the Russian guidebook as a literary form. Johnson traces the history of kraevedenie, showing how St. Petersburg–based scholars and institutions have played a central role in the evolution of the discipline. Distinguished from obvious Western equivalents such as cultural geography and the German Heimatkunde by both its dramatic history and unique social significance, kraevedenie has, for close to a hundred years, served as a key forum for expressing concepts of regional and national identity within Russian culture. How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself is published in collaboration with the Harriman Institute at Columbia University as part of its Studies of the Harriman Institute series.

Download or read book Mapping St Petersburg written by Julie A. Buckler and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pushkin's palaces or Dostoevsky's slums? Many a modern-day visitor to St. Petersburg has one or, more likely, both of these images in mind when setting foot in this stage set-like setting for some of the world's most treasured literary masterpieces. What they overlook is the vast uncharted territory in between. In Mapping St. Petersburg, Julie Buckler traces the evolution of Russia's onetime capital from a "conceptual hierarchy" to a living cultural system--a topography expressed not only by the city's physical structures but also by the literary texts that have helped create it. By favoring noncanonical works and "underdescribed spaces," Buckler seeks to revise the literary monumentalization of St. Petersburg--with Pushkin and Dostoevsky representing two traditional albeit opposing perspectives--to offer an off-center view of a richer, less familiar urban landscape. She views this grand city, the product of Peter the Great's ambitious vision, not only as a geographical entity but also as a network of genres that carries historical and cultural meaning. We discover the busy, messy "middle ground" of this hybrid city through an intricate web of descriptions in literary works; nonfiction writings such as sketches, feuilletons, memoirs, letters, essays, criticism; and urban legends, lore, songs, and social practices--all of which add character and depth to this refurbished imperial city.

Download or read book Love for Sale written by Colleen Lucey and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love for Sale is the first study to examine the ubiquity of commercial sex in Russian literary and artistic production from the nineteenth century through the fin de siècle. Colleen Lucey offers a compelling account of how the figure of the sex worker captivated the public's imagination through depictions in fiction and fine art, bringing to light how imperial Russians grappled with the issue of sexual commerce. Studying a wide range of media—from little-known engravings that circulated in newspapers to works of canonical fiction—Lucey shows how writers and artists used the topic of prostitution both to comment on women's shifting social roles at the end of tsarist rule and to express anxieties about the incursion of capitalist transactions in relations of the heart. Each of the book's chapters focus on a type of commercial sex, looking at how the street walker, brothel worker, demimondaine, kept woman, impoverished bride, and madam traded in sex as a means to acquire capital. Lucey argues that prostitution became a focal point for imperial Russians because it signaled both the promises of modernity and the anxieties associated with Westernization. Love for Sale integrates historical analysis, literary criticism, and feminist theory and conveys how nineteenth-century beliefs about the "fallen woman" drew from medical, judicial, and religious discourse on female sexuality. Lucey invites readers to draw a connection between rhetoric of the nineteenth century and today's debate on sex workers' rights, highlighting recent controversies concerning Russian sex workers to show how imperial discourse is recycled in the twenty-first century.

Download or read book Passion and Perception written by Richard Stites and published by New Academia Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2010 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of "Stitesiana" includes 29 essays on Russian culture, representing the bulk of 20 years of scholarship, in addition to well-known monographs and diverse pieces in popular magazines.

Download or read book Socialist Churches written by Catriona Kelly and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Russia, legislation on the separation of church and state in early 1918 marginalized religious faith and raised pressing questions about what was to be done with church buildings. While associated with suspect beliefs, they were also regarded as structures with potential practical uses, and some were considered works of art. This engaging study draws on religious anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and history to explore the fate of these "socialist churches," showing how attitudes and practices related to them were shaped both by laws on the preservation of monuments and anti-religious measures. Advocates of preservation, while sincere in their desire to save the buildings, were indifferent, if not hostile, to their religious purpose. Believers, on the other hand, regarded preservation laws as irritants, except when they provided leverage for use of the buildings by church communities. The situation was eased by the growing rapprochement of the Orthodox Church and Soviet state organizations after 1943, but not fully resolved until the Soviet Union fell apart. Based on abundant archival documentation, Catriona Kelly's powerful narrative portrays the human tragedies and compromises, but also the remarkable achievements, of those who fought to preserve these important buildings over the course of seven decades of state atheism. Socialist Churches will appeal to specialists, students, and general readers interested in church history, the history of architecture, and Russian art, history, and cultural studies.

Download or read book Reconstruction and Restoration of Architectural Heritage written by Sergey Sementsov and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2020-09-24 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstruction and Restoration of Architectural Heritage 2020 includes contributions on the protection, and restoration of architectural monuments and the reconstruction of major historical urban development sites, as well as various complex issues and aspects of engineering reconstruction of monuments and preservation of historical heritage. The contributions were presented at the eponymous conference (RRAH 2020, St Petersburg, Russia, 25-28 March 2020), and cover a wide range of topics: - Historical, architectural and urban planning research and restoration of monuments - Urban and regional planning - Engineering reconstruction, performance of repair and reconstruction works on monuments - Training of architects and restorers Reconstruction and Restoration of Architectural Heritage 2020 will be of interest to academics and professionals involved in the history and restoration of nature reserves, estates, cities and monuments.

Download or read book The Winter Palace and the People written by Susan McCaffray and published by Northern Illinois University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-21 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the face of a changing social landscape in their rapidly growing nineteenth-century capital, Russian monarchs reoriented their display of imperial and national representation away from courtiers and toward the urban public. When attacked at mid-century, monarchs retreated from the palace. As they receded, the public claimed the square and the artistic treasures in the Imperial Hermitage before claiming the palace itself. By 1917, the Winter Palace had come to be the essential stage for representing not just monarchy, but the civic life of the empire-nation. What was cataclysmic for the monarchy presented to those who staffed the palace and Hermitage not a disaster, but a new mission, as a public space created jointly by monarch and city passed from the one to the other. This insightful study will appeal to scholars of Russia and general readers interested in Russian history."--Amazon.

Download or read book Geotechnical Engineering for the Preservation of Monuments and Historic Sites written by Emilio Bilotta and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2013-05-10 with total page 808 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All the traces of historic heritage are a fundamental part of our environment and reward us in the form of cultural enrichment, with the ability to have a positive effect both on our lifestyle and economy. Therefore, the preservation of ancient monuments, historic towns and sites has increasingly drawn the attention of public opinion, governmental

Download or read book The Baron s Cloak written by Willard Sunderland and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg (1885–1921) was a Baltic German aristocrat and tsarist military officer who fought against the Bolsheviks in Eastern Siberia during the Russian Civil War. From there he established himself as the de facto warlord of Outer Mongolia, the base for a fantastical plan to restore the Russian and Chinese empires, which then ended with his capture and execution by the Red Army as the war drew to a close. In The Baron’s Cloak, Willard Sunderland tells the epic story of the Russian Empire’s final decades through the arc of the Baron’s life, which spanned the vast reaches of Eurasia. Tracking Ungern’s movements, he transits through the Empire’s multinational borderlands, where the country bumped up against three other doomed empires, the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Qing, and where the violence unleashed by war, revolution, and imperial collapse was particularly vicious. In compulsively readable prose that draws on wide-ranging research in multiple languages, Sunderland re-creates Ungern’s far-flung life and uses it to tell a compelling and original tale of imperial success and failure in a momentous time. Sunderland visited the many sites that shaped Ungern’s experience, from Austria and Estonia to Mongolia and China, and these travels help give the book its arresting geographical feel. In the early chapters, where direct evidence of Ungern’s activities is sparse, he evokes peoples and places as Ungern would have experienced them, carefully tracing the accumulation of influences that ultimately came together to propel the better documented, more notorious phase of his career. Recurring throughout Sunderland’s magisterial account is a specific artifact: the Baron’s cloak, an essential part of the cross-cultural uniform Ungern chose for himself by the time of his Mongolian campaign: an orangey-gold Mongolian kaftan embroidered in the Khalkha fashion yet outfitted with tsarist-style epaulettes on the shoulders. Like his cloak, Ungern was an imperial product. He lived across the Russian Empire, combined its contrasting cultures, fought its wars, and was molded by its greatest institutions and most volatile frontiers. By the time of his trial and execution mere months before the decree that created the USSR, he had become a profoundly contradictory figure, reflecting both the empire’s potential as a multinational society and its ultimately irresolvable limitations.

Download or read book Information and Empire written by Simon Franklin and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2017-11-27 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century Russia was transformed from a moderate-sized, land-locked principality into the largest empire on earth. How did systems of information and communication shape and reflect this extraordinary change? Information and Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600-1850 brings together a range of contributions to shed some light on this complex question. Communication networks such as the postal service and the gathering and circulation of news are examined alongside the growth of a bureaucratic apparatus that informed the government about its country and its people. The inscription of space is considered from the point of view of mapping and the changing public ‘graphosphere’ of signs and monuments. More than a series of institutional histories, this book is concerned with the way Russia discovered itself, envisioned itself and represented itself to its people. Innovative and scholarly, this collection breaks new ground in its approach to communication and information as a field of study in Russia. More broadly, it is an accessible contribution to pre-modern information studies, taking as its basis a country whose history often serves to challenge habitual Western models of development. It is important reading not only for specialists in Russian Studies, but also for students and non-Russianists who are interested in the history of information and communications.

Download or read book A Savage War written by Williamson Murray and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 617 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the Civil War changed the face of war The Civil War represented a momentous change in the character of war. It combined the projection of military might across a continent on a scale never before seen with an unprecedented mass mobilization of peoples. Yet despite the revolutionizing aspects of the Civil War, its leaders faced the same uncertainties and vagaries of chance that have vexed combatants since the days of Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War. A Savage War sheds critical new light on this defining chapter in military history. In a masterful narrative that propels readers from the first shots fired at Fort Sumter to the surrender of Robert E. Lee's army at Appomattox, Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh bring every aspect of the battlefield vividly to life. They show how this new way of waging war was made possible by the powerful historical forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, yet how the war was far from being simply a story of the triumph of superior machines. Despite the Union’s material superiority, a Union victory remained in doubt for most of the war. Murray and Hsieh paint indelible portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and other major figures whose leadership, judgment, and personal character played such decisive roles in the fate of a nation. They also examine how the Army of the Potomac, the Army of Northern Virginia, and the other major armies developed entirely different cultures that influenced the war’s outcome. A military history of breathtaking sweep and scope, A Savage War reveals how the Civil War ushered in the age of modern warfare.

Download or read book The Idea of Russia written by Vladislav Zubok and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-30 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dmitry Likhachev (1906-1999) was one of the most prominent Russian intellectuals of the twentieth century. His life spanned virtually the entire century - a tumultuous period which saw Russia move from Tsarist rule under Nicholas II via the Russian Revolution and Civil War into seven decades of communism followed by Gorbachev's Perestroika and the rise of Putin. In 1928, shortly after completing his university education, Likhachev was arrested, charged with counter-revolutionary ideas and imprisoned in the Gulag, where he spent the next five years. Returning to a career in academia, specialising in Old Russian literature, Likhachev played a crucial role in the cultural life of twentieth-century Russia, campaigning for the protection of important cultural sites and historic monuments. He also founded museums dedicated to great Russian writers including Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Pasternak. In this, the first biography of Likhachev to appear in English, Vladislav Zubok provides a thoroughly-researched account of one of Russia's most extraordinary and influential public figures.

Download or read book Book catalog of the Library and Information Services Division written by Environmental Science Information Center. Library and Information Services Division and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Architecture of Oblivion written by Andreas Schönle and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite attempts to promote the aesthetics of ruins in Russia—from Catherine the Great's construction of fake ruins in imperial parks to Josef Brodsky's elegiac meditations—ruins have never achieved the status they enjoy in Western Europe. While the Soviet Union was notorious for leveling churches, post-Soviet Russia has only intensified the practice of massive destruction and reconstruction. Architecture of Oblivion examines the role of ruins in the development of Russia's historical consciousness from the eighteenth century to the present. Investigating the meaning and functions ruins have acquired in Russian culture, Schönle looks at ideological reasons for the current disregard for the value of ruins and historical buildings, in particular by political authorities, and reveals how ruins have often become a site of resistance to official ideology and an invitation to map out alternative visions of history and of statehood. An interdisciplinary study of Russia's response to ruins has never been attempted, although the topic of ruins has garnered considerable interest in Western Europe and in the U.S. This original work from a leading authority on the subject will appeal to historians of Russian culture and thought, literature and art scholars, and general readers interested in ruins.

Download or read book Hidden Treasures Revealed written by Alʹbert Kostenevič and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Udstillingskatalog til Hermitage Museet, Sankt Petersborg, indeholdende franske malere

Download or read book A Public Empire written by Ekaterina Pravilova and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Property rights" and "Russia" do not usually belong in the same sentence. Rather, our general image of the nation is of insecurity of private ownership and defenselessness in the face of the state. Many scholars have attributed Russia's long-term development problems to a failure to advance property rights for the modern age and blamed Russian intellectuals for their indifference to the issues of ownership. A Public Empire refutes this widely shared conventional wisdom and analyzes the emergence of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Most importantly, A Public Empire shows the emergence of the new practices of owning "public things" in imperial Russia and the attempts of Russian intellectuals to reconcile the security of property with the ideals of the common good. The book analyzes how the belief that certain objects—rivers, forests, minerals, historical monuments, icons, and Russian literary classics—should accede to some kind of public status developed in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. Professional experts and liberal politicians advocated for a property reform that aimed at exempting public things from private ownership, while the tsars and the imperial government employed the rhetoric of protecting the sanctity of private property and resisted attempts at its limitation. Exploring the Russian ways of thinking about property, A Public Empire looks at problems of state reform and the formation of civil society, which, as the book argues, should be rethought as a process of constructing "the public" through the reform of property rights.