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.

Russian youth culture has been a subject of great interest to researchers since 1991, but most studies to date have failed to consider the global context. Looking West? engages theories of cultural globalization to chart how post-Soviet Russia&’s opening up to the West has been reflected in the cultural practices of its young people. Visitors to Russia&’s cities often interpret the presence of designer clothes shops, Internet caf&és, and a vibrant club scene as evidence of the &"Westernization&" of Russian youth. As Looking West? shows, however, the younger generation has adopted a &"pick and mix&" strategy with regard to Western cultural commodities that reflects a receptiveness to the global alongside a precious guarding of the local. The authors show us how young people perceive Russia to be positioned in current global flows of cultural exchange, what their sense of Russia&’s place in the new global order is, and how they manage to &"live with the West&" on a daily basis. Looking West? represents an important landmark in Russian-Western collaborative research. Hilary Pilkington and Elena Omel&’chenko have been at the heart of an eight-year collaboration between the University of Birmingham (U.K.) and Ul&’ianovsk State University (Russia). This book was written by Pilkington and Omel&’chenko with the team of researchers on the project&—Moya Flynn, Ul&’iana Bliudina, and Elena Starkova.

Intended as a companion to Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881-1940 (also published by OUP) and covering a later period until the present day, this stimulating, original, and controversial book will not only be a vital resource for university courses on Russian cultureat undergraduate and postgraduate level but essential reading for all those interested in Russian culture in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In a wide-ranging account of a variety of cultural forms and sites of cultural production--literature, cinema, radio, television, the visual arts, journalism, advertising and consumerism, music, theatre, the Church--the book sets out to give greater prominence to the processes of culturalreception than in previous texts. The book highlights the role images of national identity, gender politics , youth culture and the interaction of public and private consciousness have played in the formation of cultural forms in the USSR and post-communist Russia. Drawing extensively butcritically on the theoretical agenda of contemporary cultural studies the book challenges the `top-down' model according to which cultural production is determined principally by its relationship to `high' politics and political institutions. Contributors include leading specialists in Russian literature, cultural history, and cultural theory from Britain, the USA, and Russia and the text is liberally illustrated with picture features and includes a chronology of events and suggestions for further reading with each section.

This book analyzes the nature of Russia’s involvement with globalization. To date, Russia has mainly followed a course of selective openness governed by an increasingly strong state pursuing self-determination and its own vision of strategic objectives and forms of cooperation, rather than the projected reproduction of global convergence. It is also a country that is believed to be finding a new place and position for itself in the evolving global order, where European and American reflections shape the treatment of contemporary questions concerning Russia’s status in the world. The book highlights the problems and conflicts associated with political developments, democratization, economic reforms, and innovation, as well as societal perceptions and national identity formation. The world is shifting, with Russia developing its own vision of global politics and cultivating a pragmatic strategy based on national interest, one that supports globalization where necessary and opposes it where conflicts of interest and values are inevitable.

IConstructing Russian Culture offers a pioneering new account of the relationship between literature and other cultural forms in Late Imperial Russia and Revolutionary Russia. The general consensus in Western study of Russia and the Soviet Union has been that understanding of `historical background' is essential to the study of `literature'. But this consensus has so far failed to produce sophisticated overviews of the culture as a whole; literary histories seldom venture outside a rigid canon of authors and literary groupings, and the account of `historical background' sometimes amount to little more than a listing of certain predictable political and social factors that can be perceived to have `influenced' (or impeded) literary developments. This book is an ambitious attempt to recontextualize Russian literature, and rethink the relations between literature and other cultural forms. The book examines a number of, in Bourdieu's term `cultural fields' in late Imperial Russia: science and objectivity; national and personal identity; consumerism and commercial culture. There is also a `keywords' introduction explaining the evolution of concepts of the self, the nation, and `literariness' in Russian culture, and an `Epilogue' outlining the further history of the central themes after 1917. Contributors include leading specialists in Russian literature, cultural history, and cultural theory from Britain, the USA, and Russia. Intended as a companion to Russian Cultural Studies: An Introduction (also OUP), this stimulating, original, and controversial book will be a vital resource for all those interested in Russian culture during `the age of Revolution'.

Vladimir Putin has tried to rationalize the 2014 annexation of Crimea as a defense of the "millions of Russian and russophone people" who live there--an irredentist logic that rests on an understanding of a unified, fixed, primordial "Russian-ness." Challenging this notion of an essential Russian identity that must be kept pure and whole, Global Russian Cultures explores the protean complexity of Russian culture as it has spread across the world through successive waves of migration. "Both within and without the Russian Federation," explains editor Kevin Platt, "Russian culture is fragmented and multiple." In revealing Russian cultures as plural, unbounded, and polycentric, this volume calls into question the exculpatory reasoning that fuels the Russian projection of power and, implicitly, similar imperial projects.

This title was first published in 2001. Given current movements in global culture, technology, mobility, economic integration and regime transformation, what is it that can or does hold a community or political entity together? From a variety of perspectives, this text examines the cultural politics of nationalism, especially in the context of American culture and European politics where it is undergoing the most scrutiny. The first part of the volume explores the debates on the politics of national identity that surround global information and consumer distribution systems like the Internet. The second part offers a number of case studies of European domestic and foreign policy issues directly affected by arguments about cultural identity that have taken shape in the context of an increasingly global environment. Of particular interest in this volume is the tension often felt between France and the USA on the issue of culture, politics and nationalism.