Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood is a collection of multidisciplinary scholarly essays on childhood experience. The volume offers new critical approaches to Russian and Soviet childhood at the intersection of philosophy, literary criticism, film/visual studies, and history. Pedagogical ideas and practices, and the ideological and political underpinnings of the experience of growing up in pre-revolutionary Russia, the Soviet Union, and Putin’s contemporary Russia are central venues of analysis. Toward the goal of constructing the "multimedial childhood text," the contributors tackle issues of happiness and trauma associated with childhood and foreground its fluidity and instability in the Russian context. The volume further examines practices of reading childhood: as nostalgic text, documentary evidence, and historic mythology. Considering Russian childhood as historical documentation or fictional narrative, as an object of material culture, and as embodied in different media (periodicals, visual culture, and cinema), the volume intends to both problematize but also elucidate the relationship between childhood, history, and various modes of narrativity.

Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood is a collection of multidisciplinary scholarly essays on childhood experience. The volume offers new critical approaches to Russian and Soviet childhood at the intersection of philosophy, literary criticism, film/visual studies, and history. Pedagogical ideas and practices, and the ideological and political underpinnings of the experience of growing up in pre-revolutionary Russia, the Soviet Union, and Putin’s contemporary Russia are central venues of analysis. Toward the goal of constructing the "multimedial childhood text," the contributors tackle issues of happiness and trauma associated with childhood and foreground its fluidity and instability in the Russian context. The volume further examines practices of reading childhood: as nostalgic text, documentary evidence, and historic mythology. Considering Russian childhood as historical documentation or fictional narrative, as an object of material culture, and as embodied in different media (periodicals, visual culture, and cinema), the volume intends to both problematize but also elucidate the relationship between childhood, history, and various modes of narrativity.

Soviet literature in general and Soviet children’s literature in particular have often been labeled by Western and post-Soviet Russian scholars and critics as propaganda. Below the surface, however, Soviet children’s literature and culture allowed its creators greater experimental and creative freedom than did the socialist realist culture for adults. This volume explores the importance of children’s culture, from literature to comics to theater to film, in the formation of Soviet social identity and in connection with broader Russian culture, history, and society.

A lively exploration into America’s preoccupation with childhood innocence and its corruption In The Drinking Curriculum, Elizabeth Marshall brings the taboo topic of alcohol and childhood into the limelight. Marshall coins the term “the drinking curriculum” to describe how a paradoxical set of cultural lessons about childhood are fueled by adult anxieties and preoccupations. By analyzing popular and widely accessible texts in visual culture—temperance tracts, cartoons, film, advertisements, and public-service announcements—Marshall demonstrates how youth are targets of mixed messages about intoxication. Those messages range from the overtly violent to the humorous, the moralistic to the profane. Offering a critical and, at times, irreverent analysis of dominant protectionist paradigms that sanctify childhood as implicitly innocent, The Drinking Curriculum centers the graphic narratives our culture uses to teach about alcohol, the roots of these pictorial tales in the nineteenth century, and the discursive hangover we nurse into the twenty-first.

Om livet på de russiske godser indtil revolutionen

Kosher pork -- an oxymoron? Anna Shternshis's fascinating study traces the creation of a Soviet Jewish identity that disassociated Jewishness from Judaism. The cultural transformation of Soviet Jews between 1917 and 1941 was one of the most ambitious experiments in social engineering of the past century. During this period, Russian Jews went from relative isolation to being highly integrated into the new Soviet culture and society, while retaining a strong ethnic and cultural identity. This identity took shape during the 1920s and 1930s, when the government attempted to create a new Jewish culture, "national in form" and "socialist in content." Soviet and Kosher is the first study of key Yiddish documents that brought these Soviet messages to Jews, notably the "Red Haggadah," a Soviet parody of the traditional Passover manual; songs about Lenin and Stalin; scripts from regional theaters; Socialist Realist fiction; and magazines for children and adults. More than 200 interviews conducted by the author in Russia, Germany, and the United States testify to the reception of these cultural products and provide a unique portrait of the cultural life of the average Soviet Jew.

An authoritative history of Russia from early Rus' to the reign of Peter the Great.