The question of national identity has long been a vexing one in Russia, and is particularly pertinent in the post-Soviet period. Designed for students of Russian literature, culture and history, this collection of essays explores aspects of national identity in Russian culture from medieval times to the present.

Combining concepts and methodologies from anthropology, history, linguistics, literature, music, cultural studies, and film studies, this collection of ten original essays addresses issues crucial to gender and national identity in Russia from the October Revolution of 1917 to the present. Collectively, these interdisciplinary essays explore how traditional gender inequities influenced the social processes of nation building in Russia and how men and women responded to those developments. Available in both clothbound and paperback editions, Gender and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Russian Culture offers fresh insights to students and scholars in the fields of gender studies, nationhood studies, and Russian history, literature, and culture.

During the 1930s, Stalin and his entourage rehabilitated famous names from the Russian national past in a propaganda campaign designed to mobilize Soviet society for the coming war. In a provocative study, David Brandenberger traces this populist "national Bolshevism" into the 1950s, highlighting the catalytic effect that it had on Russian national identity formation.

This book brings together scholars from across a variety of disciplines who use different methodologies to interrogate the changing nature of Russian culture in the twenty-first century. The book considers a wide range of cultural forms that have been instrumental in globalizing Russia. These include literature, art, music, film, media, the internet, sport, urban spaces, and the Russian language. The book pays special attention to the processes by which cultural producers negotiate between Russian government and global cultural capital. It focuses on the issues of canon, identity, soft power and cultural exchange. The book provides a conceptual framework for analyzing Russia as a transnational entity and its contemporary culture in the globalized world.

The collapse of the Soviet Union forced Russia to engage in a process of nation building. This involved a reassessment of the past, both historical and cultural, and how it should be remembered. The publication of previously barely known underground and émigré literary works presented an opportunity to reappraise «official» Soviet literature and re-evaluate twentieth-century Russian literature as a whole. This book explores changes to the poetry canon - an instrument for maintaining individual and collective memory - to show how cultural memory has informed the evolution of post-Soviet Russian identity. It examines how concerns over identity are shaping the canon, and in which directions, and analyses the interrelationship between national identity (whether ethnic, imperial, or civic) and attempts to revise the canon. This study situates the discussion of national identity within the cultural field and in the context of canon formation as a complex expression of aesthetic, political, and institutional factors. It encompasses a period of far-reaching upheaval in Russia and reveals the tension between a desire for change and a longing for stability that was expressed by attempts to reshape the literary canon and, by doing so, to create a new twentieth-century past and the foundations of a new identity for the nation.

This thesis examines the state-sponsored rise oflocal patriotism in the post- 1961 period, interpreting this as part of the effort to strengthen popular support for and the legitimacy of the Soviet regime during the second phase of de- Stalinization. It shifts the analytical focus away from the Secret Speech of 1956, the time of Khrushchev's full-scale assault on Stalin and his legacy, to the Twenty-Second Party Congress of 1961, the inauguration of a utopian and pioneering plan to build Communism by 1980. The thesis considers how this famously forward-looking programme gave rise to an institutionalized retrospectivism as Soviet policy makers turned to the past to mobilize popular support for socialist construction. It examines how this process played out in the Russian North West, where Soviet citizens were encouraged to turn inwards to examine their local history and traditions, and to reread these through the lens of Soviet socialism. The thesis takes as a case study the towns of Novgorod, Pskov, and Vologda, where the state-sponsored regeneration of local traditions significantly impacted on the self-perception of local communities. In the first part, I look at the strategies for representing and displaying local culture in pubic institutions: the textual treatment and symbolic ordering of urban space in local tourist guides; the heritage movement and the attribution of cultural value to certain objects from the local landscape; and the primary focuses of the exhibitive 'gaze' in local museums. The second part of the thesis shifts the focus from institutionalized culture to popular culture, examining the informal practices and oral traditions that exist alongside the authoritative discourses of social identity in the post- Soviet period. The popular interpretation of public sculpture, the collective imagination of urban space, and the 'common knowledge' of the past as it is articulated in oral narratives are the focuses of discussion.