Download or read book The Russian Country Estate Today written by Laura A Victoir and published by ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press. This book was released on 2006-03-30 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia’s country estates were fulcrums of culture, learning and socio-administration under the imperial state. Only a fraction of the original numbers of these structures survives today, and yet even today several of the most famous of these buildings have uncertain futures. At risk is the survival of this fascinating remnant of Russia’s cultural history. This matter is especially salient as post-Soviet Russia has participated in a struggle over means of its own self-representation. Historic landmarks enter the political arena during periods of drastic change. The struggle over monuments reveals notable adjustments and continuities over a nation’s historical narrative; the study of the treatment of certain monuments provides insight to the language, symbols and memory of a people in transition. This book examines links between two seemingly divergent spheres of human interaction, those of politics and culture. The aim of this book is not to analyse the artistic and architectural merits of Russia’s country estates, as a plethora of works already address this subject. Rather, the objective is to look at the underlying attitudes and circumstances which affect the survival of this integral feature of Russia’s pre-revolutionary secular past. A variety of factors come into play in estate preservation, such as: privatization, restitution, taxation, legislation, actions of governmental and non-government organizations, tourism, and others. This book analyzes Russia’s institutions and actors that continually compete for shifting and scarce resources in the sphere of culture, often to the detriment of physical cultural artefacts themselves. More than just Russia’s estates are subject to these forces although estates serve as an excellent lens with which to view these destructive processes at work.
Download or read book Life on the Russian Country Estate written by Priscilla R. Roosevelt and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-09-01 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Om livet på de russiske godser indtil revolutionen
Download or read book Russian Architecture and the West written by Dmitriĭ Olegovich Shvidkovskiĭ and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to show the development of Russian architecture over the past thousand years as a part of the history of Western architecture. Dmitry Shvidkovsky, Russia’s leading architectural historian, departs from the accepted notion that Russian architecture developed independent of outside cultural influences and demonstrates that, to the contrary, the influence of the West extends back to the tenth century and continues into the present. He offers compelling assessments of all the main masterpieces of Russian architecture and frames a radically new architectural history for Russia. The book systematically analyzes Russian buildings in relation to developments in European art, pointing out where familiar European features are expressed in Russian projects. Special attention is directed toward decorations based on Byzantine models; the heritage of Italian master builders and carvers; the impact of architects and others sent by Elizabeth I; the formation of the Russian Imperial Baroque; the Enlightenment in Russian art; and 19th- and 20th-century European influences. With over 300 specially commissioned photographs of sites throughout Russia and western Europe, this magnificent book is both beautiful and groundbreaking.
Download or read book The Cossack Myth written by Serhii Plokhy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years following the Napoleonic Wars, a mysterious manuscript began to circulate among the dissatisfied noble elite of the Russian Empire. Entitled The History of the Rus', it became one of the most influential historical texts of the modern era. Attributed to an eighteenth-century Orthodox archbishop, it described the heroic struggles of the Ukrainian Cossacks. Alexander Pushkin read the book as a manifestation of Russian national spirit, but Taras Shevchenko interpreted it as a quest for Ukrainian national liberation, and it would inspire thousands of Ukrainians to fight for the freedom of their homeland. Serhii Plokhy tells the fascinating story of the text's discovery and dissemination, unravelling the mystery of its authorship and tracing its subsequent impact on Russian and Ukrainian historical and literary imagination. In so doing he brilliantly illuminates the relationship between history, myth, empire and nationhood from Napoleonic times to the fall of the Soviet Union.
Download or read book Translated and Visiting Russian Theatre in Britain 1945 2015 written by Cynthia Marsh and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-05-18 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tackles questions about the reception and production of translated and untranslated Russian theatre in post-WW2 Britain: why in British minds is Russia viewed almost as a run-of-the-mill production of a Chekhov play. Is it because Chekhov is so dominant in British theatre culture? What about all those other Russian writers? Many of them are very different from Chekhov. A key question was formulated, thanks to a review by Susannah Clapp of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country: have the British staged a ‘Russia of the theatrical mind’?
Download or read book When Emancipation Came written by Sally Stocksdale and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-09-21 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linked by declarations of emancipation within the same five-year period, two countries shared human rights issues on two distinct continents. In this book, readers will find a case-study comparison of the emancipation of Russian serfs on the Yazykovo Selo estate and American slaves at the Palmyra Plantation. Although state policies and reactions may not follow the same paths in each area, there were striking thematic parallels. These findings add to our understanding of what happens throughout an emancipation process in which the state grants freedom, and therefore speaks to the universality of the human experience. Despite the political and economic differences between the two countries, as well as their geographic and cultural distances, this book re-conceptualizes emancipation and its aftermath in each country: from a history that treats each as a separate, self-contained story to one with a unified, global framework.
Download or read book European National Identities written by Roland Vogt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making sense of the perplexing diversity of Europe is a challenging task. How compatible are national identities in Europe? What makes Europe European? What do Europeans have in common? European National Identities explores the diversity of European states, nations, and peoples. In doing so, the editors focus on the origins and elements of different national identities in Europe and different themes of national self-understanding. Each chapter contributes a unique view of national identities gravitating around myth, historical experiences and traumas, values, ethnic and linguistic differences, and religious fault lines. This work grounds European national identities within cultural, historical, and political dynamics, which makes the work approachable for many readers, including historians, sociologists, and political scientists. In addition, the editors illustrate that national identities continue to be a source of contention and a challenge to political developments, the demands of immigrants and minorities, and the dynamics of European integration. This book draws particular attention to identity shifts and conflicts within individual European countries.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Contemporary Russian Culture written by Smorodinskaya and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 780 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This addition to the highly successful Contemporary Cultures series covers the period from period 1953, with the death of Stalin, to the present day. Both ‘Russian’ and ‘Culture’ are defined broadly. ‘Russian’ refers to the Soviet Union until 1991 and the Russian Federation after 1991. Given the diversity of the Federation in its ethnic composition and regional characteristics, questions of national, regional, and ethnic identity are given special attention. There is also coverage of Russian-speaking immigrant communities. ‘Culture’ embraces all aspects of culture and lifestyle, high and popular, artistic and material: art, fashion, literature, music, cooking, transport, politics and economics, film, crime – all, and much else, are covered, in order to give a full picture of the Russian way of life and experience throughout the extraordinary changes undergone since the middle of the twentieth century. The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Russian Culture is an unbeatable resource on recent and contemporary Russian culture and history for students, teachers and researchers across the disciplines. Apart from academic libraries, the book will also be a valuable acquisition for public libraries. Entries include cross-references and the larger ones carry short bibliographies. There is a full index.
Download or read book The House in the Garden written by John Randolph and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Aspiring thinkers require a stage for their performance and an audience to help give their actions distinction and meaning. To be made durable and influential, their charismatic stories have to be framed by supporting ideals, practices, and institutions. Although the biographies of the Empire's most famous thinkers have a comfortable platform in modern Russia's printed record, scholars have yet to explore fully the intimate context surrounding their activities in the early nineteenth century. There is, as a result, a certain homeless quality to our understandings of Imperial Russian culture, which this history of one extremely productive home will help us correct."—from The House in the Garden The House in the Garden explores the role played by domesticity in the making of Imperial Russian intellectual traditions. It tells the story of the Bakunins, a distinguished noble family who in 1779 chose to abandon their home in St. Petersburg for a rustic manor house in central Russia's Tver Province. At the time, the Russian government was encouraging its elite subjects to see their private lives as a forum for the representation of imperial virtues and norms. Drawing on the family's vast archive, Randolph describes the Bakunins' attempts to live up to this ideal and to convert their new home, Priamukhino, into an example of modern civilization. In particular, Randolph shows how the Bakunin home fostered the development of a group of charismatic young students from Moscow University, who in the 1830s sought to use their experiences at Priamukhino to reimagine themselves as agents of Russia's enlightenment. Some of the story Randolph tells is familiar to historians. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, whose early philosophical evolution Randolph describes, was born at Priamukhino, while the radical critic Vissarion Belinsky claimed to have been transformed by his experiences there. When Tom Stoppard sought to portray the spiritual history of the Russian intelligentia in his trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, he chose Priamukhino as the scene for act 1. Yet Randolph's research allows us to watch this drama from a radically different perspective. It shows how the culture of Russian Idealism—so long presumed to be a product of alienation—actually relied on the support provided by the cult of distinction that the Russian government had built around noble homes. It also allows us to see the other actors and agents of private life—and most notably, the Bakunin women—as participants in the creation of modern Russian social thought. The result is a work that revises our understanding of Russian intellectual history while also contributing to the histories of women, gender, private life, and memory in nineteenth-century Russia.
Download or read book Family Memory written by Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Family Memory: Practices, Transmissions and Uses in a Global Perspective, researchers from five different continents explore the significance of family memory as an analytical tool and a research concept. Family memory is the most important memory community. This volume illustrates the range and power of family memories, often neglected by memory studies dealing with larger mnemonic entities. This book highlights the potential of family memory research for understanding societies’past and present and the need for a more comprehensive and systematic use of family memories. The contributors explain how family memories can be a valuable resource across a range of settings pertaining to individual and collective identities, national memories, intergenerational transmission processes and migration, transnational and diasporic studies. This volume presents the past, present and future of family memory as a prospective field of memory studies and the role of family memory in intergenerational transmission of social and political values. Family memory of violent events and genocide is also looked at, with discussions of the Armenian Genocide, Russian Revolution and Rwandan Genocide. This book will be an important read for cultural and oral historians; family historians; public historians; researchers in narrative studies, psychology, politics and international studies.
Download or read book Anna Karenina and Others written by Liza Knapp and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2016-07-31 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liza Knapp offers a fresh approach to understanding Tolstoy's construction of his novel Anna Karenina and how he creates patterns of meaning. Her analysis draws on works that were critical to his understanding of the interconnectedness of human lives, including The Scarlet Letter, Middlemarch, and Blaise Pascal's Pens es. Knapp concludes with a tour-de-force reading of Mrs. Dalloway as Virginia Woolf's response to Tolstoy's treatment of Anna Karenina and others.
Download or read book Sergei Rachmaninoff written by Valeria Z. Nollan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-10-03 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Valeria Z. Nollan’s biography of perhaps the finest pianist of the twentieth century plunges readers into Rachmaninoff’s complex inner world. Sergei Rachmaninoff: Cross Rhythms of the Soul is the first biography of Rachmaninoff in English that presents him in the fullness of his Russian identity. As someone whose own life in Russian emigration ran in parallel ways to Rachmaninoff’s own—and whose meetings with the composer’s grandson in Switzerland informed her work—Nollan brings important cultural insights into her observations of the activities of this generation of creative artists. She also traces the intricacies of Rachmaninoff’s relations with the women closest to him—whose imprints are palpable in his compositions—and introduces a mystery woman whose existence challenges our established narrative of his life.
Download or read book Serfdom Society and the Arts in Imperial Russia written by Richard Stites and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-02-22 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Stites explores the dramatic shift in the history of visual and performing arts that took place in the last decades of serfdom in Russia in the 1860s and revisualises the culture of that flamboyant era.
Download or read book Reeling In Russia written by Fen Montaigne and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1999-04-15 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning journalist Fen Montaigne brings together Russia, fly-fishing, and history in this dynamic narrative.
Download or read book Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century written by Rosalind Polly Blakesley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Russian genre painting in the first three quarters of the nineteenth century. It focuses on five major artists who made significant contributions to Russian intellectual life: Venetsianov, Bryullov, Ivanov, Fedotov, and Perov.
Download or read book The House of Government written by Yuri Slezkine and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-07 with total page 1123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building’s residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.
Download or read book No Place for Russia written by William H. Hill and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The optimistic vision of a “Europe whole and free” after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has given way to disillusionment, bitterness, and renewed hostility between Russia and the West. In No Place for Russia, William H. Hill traces the development of the post–Cold War European security order to explain today’s tensions, showing how attempts to integrate Russia into a unified Euro-Atlantic security order were gradually overshadowed by the domination of NATO and the EU—at Russia’s expense. Hill argues that the redivision of Europe has been largely unintended and not the result of any single decision or action. Instead, the current situation is the cumulative result of many decisions—reasonably made at the time—that gradually produced the current security architecture and led to mutual mistrust. Hill analyzes the United States’ decision to remain in Europe after the Cold War, the emergence of Germany as a major power on the continent, and the transformation of Russia into a nation-state, placing major weight on NATO’s evolution from an alliance dedicated primarily to static collective territorial defense into a security organization with global ambitions and capabilities. Closing with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and war in eastern Ukraine, No Place for Russia argues that the post–Cold War security order in Europe has been irrevocably shattered, to be replaced by a new and as-yet-undefined order.
