-----Original Message-----
From: ESRCs East West Programme [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Serguei A. Oushakine
Sent: Sunday, October 16, 2011 1:29 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Cristina Vatulescu has been awarded the 2011 Heldt Prize for the
best book by a woman in any area of Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian studies
2011 Heldt Prize Awarded to Cristina Vatulescu
Cristina Vatulescu has been awarded the 2011 Heldt Prize for the best book
by a woman in any area of Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian studies for her
book Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film & the Secret Police in Soviet
Times.
From the AWSS Heldt Prize Committee,
"Cristina Vatulescu's Police Aesthetics is a thrilling work of scholarship:
to borrow a suitable word from Vatulescu herself, it is arresting. Drawing
on her research in Russian and Romanian archives, she reveals the secret
police as avid consumers and sometimes preservers of culture, as a poet's
most attentive readers and listeners, and as producers or models for
artistic production. The secret police dossier proves to be a genre with its
own rules of composition, and many of the fiction and films of the socialist
era reveal the shaping influence of police interrogations. Vatulescu finds
telling evidence in files on important cultural figures, such as Mikhail
Bulgakov, in the years when first-person narratives were the most dangerous
kind of literature and anyone might discover that his or her biography was
being written by the secret police and pseudonymous informers. Clearly laid
out, with beautifully integrated theory and fireworks of intellectual
energy, the book applies to any Socialist Bloc citizen who may have
encountered the secret police-and perhaps to all of us. Police Aesthetics
offers both fascinating information and an unusually entertaining reading
experience."
Cristina Vatulescu. Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret
Police in Soviet Times, 2010. 264 pp. 29 illustrations. ISBN: 9780804760805.
Stanford University Press, 2010.
http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=16214
The documents emerging from the secret police archives of the former Soviet
bloc have caused scandal after scandal, compromising revered cultural
figures and abruptly ending political careers. Police Aesthetics offers a
revealing and responsible approach to such materials. Taking advantage of
the partial opening of the secret police archives in Russia and Romania,
Vatulescu focuses on their most infamous holdings-the personal files-as well
as on movies the police sponsored, scripted, or authored. Through the
archives, she gains new insights into the writing of literature and raises
new questions about the ethics of reading. She shows how Soviet files and
films influenced the writing of literature, from autobiographies to novels,
from high-culture classics to avant-garde experiments and popular
blockbusters. In so doing, she opens a fresh chapter in the heated debate
about the relationship between culture and politics in twentieth-century
police states.
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