Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia PDF Download

Author: Richard Stites
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300128185
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 636

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Book Description
Serf-era and provincial Russia heralded the spectacular turn in cultural history that began in the 1860s. Examining the role of arts and artists in society’s value system, Richard Stites explores this shift in a groundbreaking history of visual and performing arts in the last decades of serfdom. Provincial town and manor house engaged the culture of Moscow and St. Petersburg while thousands of serfs and ex-serfs created or performed. Mikhail Glinka raised Russian music to new levels and Anton Rubinstein struggled to found a conservatory. Long before the itinerants, painters explored town and country in genre scenes of everyday life. Serf actors on loan from their masters brought naturalistic acting from provincial theaters to the imperial stages. Stites’s richly detailed book offers new perspectives on the origins of Russia’s nineteenth-century artistic prowess.

Author: Richard Stites
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300137575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 636

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Book Description
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.

Author: Teresa A. Meade
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470692820
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 691

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Book Description
A Companion to Gender History surveys the history of womenaround the world, studies their interaction with men in genderedsocieties, and looks at the role of gender in shaping humanbehavior over thousands of years. An extensive survey of the history of women around the world,their interaction with men, and the role of gender in shaping humanbehavior over thousands of years. Discusses family history, the history of the body andsexuality, and cultural history alongside women’s history andgender history. Considers the importance of class, region, ethnicity, race andreligion to the formation of gendered societies. Contains both thematic essays and chronological-geographicessays. Gives due weight to pre-history and the pre-modern era as wellas to the modern era. Written by scholars from across the English-speaking world andscholars for whom English is not their first language.

Author: Jeffrey Brooks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108484468
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
A century of Russian artistic genius, including literature, art, music and dance, within the dynamic cultural ecosystem that shaped it.

Author: Tomila V. Lankina
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009080393
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
A devastating challenge to the idea of communism as a 'great leveller', this extraordinarily original, rigorous, and ambitious book debunks Marxism-inspired accounts of its equalitarian consequences. It is the first study systematically to link the genesis of the 'bourgeoisie-cum-middle class' – Imperial, Soviet, and post-communist – to Tzarist estate institutions which distinguished between nobility, clergy, the urban merchants and meshchane, and peasants. It demonstrates how the pre-communist bourgeoisie, particularly the merchant and urban commercial strata but also the high human capital aristocracy and clergy, survived and adapted in Soviet Russia. Under both Tzarism and communism, the estate system engendered an educated, autonomous bourgeoisie and professional class, along with an oppositional public sphere, and persistent social cleavages that continue to plague democratic consensus. This book also shows how the middle class, conventionally bracketed under one generic umbrella, is often two-pronged in nature – one originating among the educated estates of feudal orders, and the other fabricated as part of state-induced modernization.

Author: Andrey Shabanov
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501335529
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Andrey Shabanov's seminal reinterpretation of the Peredvizhniki is a comprehensive study that examines in-depth for the first time the organizational structure, self-representation, exhibitions, and critical reception of this 19th-century artistic partnership. Shabanov advances a more pragmatic reading of the Peredvizhniki, artists seeking professional and creative freedom in authoritarian Tsarist Russia. He likewise demonstrates and challenges how and why the group eventually came to be defined as a critically-minded Realist art movement. Unprecedentedly rich in new primary visual and textual sources, the book also connects afresh the Russian and Western art worlds of the period. A must-read for anyone interested in Russian art and culture, 19th-century European art, and also the history of art exhibitions, art movements, and the art market.

Author: Deborah A. Martinsen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316462447
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 589

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Book Description
This volume explores the Russia where the great writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), was born and lived. It focuses not only on the Russia depicted in Dostoevsky's works, but also on the Russian life that he and his contemporaries experienced: on social practices and historical developments, political and cultural institutions, religious beliefs, ideological trends, artistic conventions and literary genres. Chapters by leading scholars illuminate this broad context, offer insights into Dostoevsky's reflections on his age, and examine the expression of those reflections in his writing. Each chapter investigates a specific context and suggests how we might understand Dostoevsky in relation to it. Since Russia took so much from Western Europe throughout the imperial period, the volume also locates the Russian experience within the context of Western thought and practices, thereby offering a multidimensional view of the unfolding drama of Russia versus the West in the nineteenth century.

Author: Lynn M. Sargeant
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190453672
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Harmony and Discord: Music and the Transformation of Russian Cultural Life explores the complex development of Russian musical life during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the heart of this cultural history lies the Russian Musical Society, as both a unique driving force behind the institutionalization of music and a representative of the growing importance of voluntary associations in public life. Sustained simultaneously by private initiative and cooperative relationships with the state, the Russian Musical Society played a key role in the creation of Russia's infrastructure for music and music education. Author Lynn M. Sargeant explores the fluid nature of Russian social identity through the broad scope of musical life, including not only the "leading lights" of the era but also rank-and-file musicians, teachers, and students. Although Russian musicians longed for a secure place within the new hierarchy of professions, their social status remained ambiguous throughout the nineteenth century. Traditional reliance on serf musicians and foreigners left lasting scars that motivated musicians' efforts to obtain legal rights and social respectability. And women's increasing visibility in the musical world provoked acrimonious debates that were, at heart, efforts by male musicians to strengthen their claims to professional status by denying the legitimacy of female participation. Sargeant demonstrates that the successful development of a Russian musical infrastructure salved persistent anxieties about Russia's place vis-à-vis its European cultural competitors. Remarkably, the institutions developed by the Russian Musical Society survived the upheavals of war and revolution to become the foundation for the Soviet musical system. A wealth of historical documentation makes Harmony and Discord required reading for musicologists, sociologists and historians interested in this period, and the abundance of amusing anecdotes and the author's lucid and lively literary style make it an enjoyable history for all readers.

Author: Alyssa Quint
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253038642
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Jewish Book Award Finalist: “Turns the fascinating life of Avrom Goldfaden into a multi-dimensional history of the Yiddish theater’s formative years.” —Jeffery Veidinger, author of Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire In this book, Alyssa Quint focuses on the early years of the modern Yiddish theater, from roughly 1876 to 1883, through the works of one of its best-known and most colorful figures, Avrom Goldfaden. Goldfaden (né Goldenfaden, 1840-1908) was one of the first playwrights to stage a commercially viable Yiddish-language theater, first in Romania and then in Russia. Goldfaden’s work was rapidly disseminated in print and his plays were performed frequently for Jewish audiences. Sholem Aleichem considered him as a forger of a new language that “breathed the European spirit into our old jargon.” Quint uses Goldfaden’s theatrical works as a way to understand the social life of Jewish theater in Imperial Russia. Through a study of his libretti, she looks at the experiences of Russian Jewish actors, male and female, to explore connections between culture as artistic production and culture in the sense of broader social structures. Quint explores how Jewish actors who played Goldfaden’s work on stage absorbed the theater into their everyday lives. Goldfaden’s theater gives a rich view into the conduct, ideology, religion, and politics of Jews during an important moment in the history of late Imperial Russia.

Author: Janet M. Hartley
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300256043
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
The longest river in Europe, the Volga stretches over three and a half thousand km from the heart of Russia to the Caspian Sea, separating west from east. The river has played a crucial role in the history of the peoples who are now a part of the Russian Federation—and has united and divided the land through which it flows.Janet Hartley explores the history of Russia through the Volga from the seventh century to the present day. She looks at it as an artery for trade and as a testing ground for the Russian Empire’s control of the borderlands, at how it featured in Russian literature and art, and how it was crucial for the outcome of the Second World War at Stalingrad. This vibrant account unearths what life on the river was really like, telling the story of its diverse people and its vital place in Russian history.