Slavic Review ▪ Volume 71 Number 3
ABSTRACTS
Delayed Discovery or Willful Forgetting? The Reception of Polish Classical Modernism in America
Steven Mansbach
Polish modern art was collected by leading figures within America’s cultural vanguard. Most prized the art’s stylistic innovation; they were likely unaware of the ideological charge that animated modernism’s makers. By the end of the 1930s, numerous exhibitions of Polish art had been mounted in the United States; however, few concentrated on strikingly innovative works, preferring instead traditional themes, genres, and styles. Nonetheless, Poland’s modernist efforts garnered popular success at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. The modern art from other central and eastern European nations was actively promoted by its makers, who had immigrated to the United States. Poland’s modern art did not benefit from a similar presence, its modernists having mostly elected to remain in their native land. The paucity of Polish artists in 1930s America compromised their chance to exercise an influential role just as the United States was consolidating an international canon of modern art.
Avant-Garde Anachronisms: Prague’s Group of Fine Artists and Viennese Art Theory
Naomi Hume
The Czech Group of Fine Artists published their journal, Umělecký měsíčník (Art Monthly, 1911–1914) to justify their abstraction and their interest in French cubism in response to criticism that denigrated their work as incomprehensible and foreign. In this article, Naomi Hume argues that the Group’s strategy was fundamentally at odds with how avant-gardes have been understood to operate in scholarship on modernism. Rather than asserting a break with the past, the Group applied new Viennese art historical approaches—particularly those of Alois Riegl, Max Dvořák, and Vincenc Kramář—to draw parallels between their work and prior art objects that departed from mimesis. They equated their radical style with what Riegl called anachronisms in art’s development, moments when an independent will to form emerges from the mainstream. By bringing French cubist ideas into dialogue with the inherent spirituality of their own national tradition, the Group saw themselves as reinvigorating Czech art.
The Shattered Self of Komsomol Civil War Memoirs
Sean Guillory
The Russian civil war was a fratricidal climax of seven years of war and revolution that fractured Russian society. Its traumatic effects on postrevolutionary life are beyond measure. In this article Sean Guillory examines memoirs of Komsomol civil war veterans to illuminate the ways the war shaped their sense of self. Guillory argues that veterans’ memoirs reveal a shattering of the self where their efforts to narrate their experience as agents of war was overshadowed by their transformation on the battlefield into instinctual beings, imprisoned by emotions, senses, nerves, and muscles. Guillory engages the scholarship on the Soviet self and subjectivity by calling attention to the ways trauma produces a “darker side” of the self, and in particular, how the body serves as a long-term depository for experiences of loss, disorientation, and deprivation.
Exile, Gender, and Communist Self-Fashioning: Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria) in the Soviet Union
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum
Focusing on the Soviet exile of the Spanish communist and orator Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria), Lisa A. Kirschenbaum brings into dialogue two topics often treated in isolation: Soviet subjectivities and the self-understandings of international communists. During the Spanish civil war, the Soviet media popularized Ibárruri’s performance of fierce communist motherhood. The article traces Ibárruri’s efforts in exile to maintain and adapt this public identity by analyzing sources in two distinct registers, both of which blurred the boundaries between public and private selves: Ibárruri’s “official” correspondence and her interventions in party meetings. Reading such sources as sites of self-fashioning, Kirschenbaum argues that Ibárruri was at once empowered and constrained by her self-presentation as the mother of the Spanish exiles. Ibárruri’s case both internationalizes understandings of Stalinist culture and suggests the possibility of a history of international communism structured around the interconnected and diverse lives of individual communists.
Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity
Emma Widdis
In this article, Emma Widdis suggests that a sensory history is a crucial counterpart to the recent emotional turn in Russian and Slavic scholarship on Russian and Slavic history and culture. In particular, the Soviet revolutionary project was a unique attempt to create new models of human experience to correspond to the new political order—an attempt to shape sensory experience itself. Widdis suggests that the still-young medium of cinema was a privileged site for the investigation of new models of sensory perception, for the working out of the problematic relationship between the body, the mind, and the world that had such ideological potency in early Soviet Russia. Linking close readings of little-known films from this period to a broader analysis of the discursive field within which they operated, Widdis suggests that, in the period of transition between 1928 and 1932, intensified sensory (and particularly tactile) experience emerged as a new and revolutionary mode of being in the world.
Deer in Headlights: Incompetence and Weak Authoritarianism after the Cold War
Lucan A. Way
Based on a detailed analysis of Belarusian politics and the rise of Aliaksandar Lukashenka in the early 1990s, this article explores the sources, character, and impact of authoritarian incompetence and skill on regime outcomes after the Cold War. One type of incompetence—deer in headlights—emerges out of the disorientation and persistence of older regime practices in the face of rapid political change. This type of incompetence was one important but largely unrecognized source of political contestation in the former Soviet Union and other parts of the developing world in the early 1990s. Rapid change in the international environment that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War created novel demands that existing autocrats often did not know how to deal with—even when they had the structural resources to survive. The result was greater contestation and more incumbent turnover than would have existed otherwise.
FEATURED REVIEWS
Richard L. DiNardo, Breakthrough: The Gorlice-Tarnow Campaign, 1915; Richard C. Hall, Balkan Breakthrough: The Battle of Dobro Pole, 1918; Graydon A. Tunstall, Blood on the Snow: The Carpathian Winter War of 1915 (Mark Cornwall) 647
Brian Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland (Timothy Snyder) 650
Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962 (David A. Kideckel) 652
Johanna Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Zsuzsa Gille) 655
Jonathan Haslam, Russia’s Cold War: From the October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall (Vladislav Zubok) 657
FILM REVIEWS
Robin Hessman, dir., My Perestroika: A Documentary Film; Françoise Huguier, dir., Kommunalka (Lilya Kaganovsky) 660
BOOK REVIEWS
Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture (Michael Holquist) 662
Brian James Baer, ed., Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia (Michael Heim) 663
Mark D. Steinberg and Valeria Sobol, eds., Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe (Susan Morrissey) 665
Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion, Utopia (David Ost) 666
Gareth Dale, ed., First the Transition, Then the Crash: Eastern Europe in the 2000s (Paul Dragos Aligica) 668
Tijana Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (K. E. Fleming) 669
Charles Ingrao, Nikola Samardžić, and Jovan Pešalj, eds., The Peace of Passarowitz, 1718. (Franz A. J. Szabo) 670
Cynthia Paces, Prague Panoramas: National Memory and Sacred Space in the Twentieth Century (T. Mills Kelly) 672
Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe, eds., Stalinist Terror in Eastern Europe: Elite Purges and Mass Repression (Norman M. Naimark) 673
Jan Musekamp, Zwischen Stettin und Szczecin: Metamorphosen einer Stadt von 1945 bis 2005 (John Czaplicka) 674
Marcus Sonntag, Die Arbeitslager in der DDR (Dierk Hoffmann) 675
Attila Kolontári, Hungarian-Soviet Relations, 1920-1941, trans. Matthew Caples and Sean Lambert (Tom Sakmyster) 677
Deborah S. Cornelius, Hungary in World War II: Caught in the Cauldron (Ivan T. Berend) 678
Theodora Dragostinova, Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900-1949 (Keith Brown) 679
Yannis Sygkelos, Nationalism from the Left: The Bulgarian Communist Party during the Second World War and the Early Post-War Years (Theodora Dragostinova) 680
Friederike Baer, Zwischen Anlehnung und Abgrenzung: Die Jugoslawienpolitik der DDR 1946 bis 1968 (Patrick Hyder Patterson) 681
Ksenija Cvetković-Sander, Sprachpolitik und nationale Identität im Sozialistischen Jugoslawien (1945-1991): Serbokroatisch, Albanisch, Makedonisch und Slowenisch (Emil Kerenji) 683
Heinrich Bosse, Otto-Heinrich Elias, and Thomas Taterka, eds., Baltische Literaturen in der Goethezeit (Thomas Salumets) 684
George Z. Gasyna, Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise: Exilic Discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz (Michael Goddard) 685
Jiřina Šmejkalová, Cold War Books in the “Other” Europe and What Came After (Sari Autio-Sarasmo) 686
Josip Glaurdic, The Hour of Europe: Western Powers and the Breakup of Yugoslavia (Paul S. Shoup) 687
Lavinia Stan and Lucian Turcescu, Church, State, and Democracy in Expanding Europe (Timothy A. Byrnes) 688
Roman David, Lustration and Transitional Justice: Personnel Systems in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (Kieran Williams) 689
Mikhail Krom, “Vdovstvuiushchee tsarstvo”: Politicheskii krizis v Rossii 30-40-kh godov XVI veka (Donald Ostrowski) 691
Liubov Kurtynova-D’Herlugnan, The Tsar’s Abolitionists: The Slave Trade in the Caucasus and Its Suppression (G. M. Hamburg) 692
Tracy Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom (Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter) 693
Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meir, and Israel Bartal, eds., Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History (Olga Litvak) 695
Vera Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (David Schimmelpennick van der Oye) 696
Andrei Znamenski, Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia (Dany Savelli) 697
Stephen Velychenko, State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine: A Comparative Study of Governments and Bureaucrats, 1917-1922 (Taras Hunczak) 698
Scott B. Smith, Captives of Revolution: The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, 1918-1923 (Michael Melancon) 699
Aleksandr Vasil’evich Antoshchenko, Russkii liberal-anglofil Pavel Gavrilovich Vinogradov: Monografiia (Adrian Jones) 701
G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole, eds., A History of Russian Philosophy, 1830-1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity (John Randolph) 702
Leonid Rein, The Kings and the Pawns: Collaboration in Byelorussia during World War II (Martin C. Dean) 703
Olga Kucherenko, Little Soldiers: How Soviet Children Went to War, 1941-1945 (Reina Pennington) 704
Anne E. Gorsuch, All This Is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin (Lewis H. Siegelbaum) 706
Eva Maurer, Julia Richers, Monica Rüthers, and Carmen Scheide, eds., Soviet Space Culture: Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies (Andrew Jenks) 707
Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War (Miriam Dobson) 708
Nicholas Khoo, Collateral Damage: Sino-Soviet Rivalry and the Termination of the Sino-Vietnamese Alliance (Bruce A. Elleman) 709
Marina Aptekman, Jacob’s Ladder: Kabbalistic Allegory in Russian Literature (Henrietta Mondry) 710
Sjeng Scheijen, Diaghilev: A Life, trans. Jane Hedley-Prôle and S. J. Leinbach (Stephen D. Press) 711
Dana Dragunoiu, Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism (Thomas Karshan) 713
Yuri Leving, Keys to The Gift: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel (Priscilla Meyer) 714
Frank Ellis, The Damned and the Dead: The Eastern Front through the Eyes of Soviet and Russian Novelists (Angela Brintlinger) 715
Derek C. Maus, Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire (Denise J. Youngblood) 716
Mark Lipovetsky, Charms of the Cynical Reason: The Trickster’s Transformations in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture (Alexander Prokhorov) 717
Adrian Wanner, Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora (Karen Ryan) 719
Ol’ga Khristoforova, Kolduny i zhertvy: Antropologiia koldovstva v sovremennoi Rossii (W. F. Ryan) 720
Stephen K. Wegren, Land Reform in Russia: Institutional Design and Behavioral Responses (M. Donald Hancock) 721
Lale Yalçin-Heckmann, The Return of Private Property: Rural Life after Agrarian Reform in the Republic of Azerbaijan (Zvi Lerman) 722
Tom Trier, Hedvig Lohm, and David Szakonyi, Under Siege: Inter-Ethnic Relations in Abkhazia (Stephen Jones) 723
Scott Radnitz, Weapons of the Wealthy: Predatory Regimes and Elite-Led Protests in Central Asia (Shireen T. Hunter) 725
Eric Freedman and Richard Shafer, eds., After the Czars and Commissars: Journalism in Authoritarian Post-Soviet Central Asia (Russell Zanca) 726
REFERENCE BOOKS OF 2010-2011 728
COLLECTED ESSAYS 733
OTHER BOOKS OF INTEREST 735
|