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E-book

Title Energy culture : work, power, and waste in Russia and the Soviet Union / Jillian Porter, Maya Vinokour, editors
Published Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan, 2022

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Description 1 online resource : illustrations (colour)
Series Literatures, cultures, and the environment
Literatures, cultures, and the environment.
Contents 1 Introduction: Energy Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union -- 2 The Energy of Chernyshevskys Vera Pavlovna in the Modern Cultural Economy -- 3 The Energy Trap: Anna Karenina as a Parable for the Twenty-First Century -- 4 Picturing Coal in the Donbas: Nikolai Kasatkin and the Energy of Late Realism -- 5 Polar Fantasies: Valery Bryusov and the Russian Symbolist Electric Aesthetic -- 6 Energetic Liquids in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Utopianism -- 7 Revolutionary Burnout and the Rise of the Soviet Rest Regime -- 8 The Mechanics and Energetics of Soviet Communism: The Poetics of Peat -- 9 Leonid Brezhnev and the Elixir of Life -- 10 Russian Oil: Tragic Past, Radiant Future, and the Resurrection of the Dead -- 11 Of Mice and Degenerators: Post-progress Energy and Posthuman Bodies in Tatyana Tolstayas The Slynx -- 12 Hydrocarbons on Hold: Energy Aesthetics of Teriberka in the Russian Arctic -- 13 Afterword on Chernobyl (2019): A Soviet Propaganda Win Delivered 33 Years Late
Summary This volume investigates energy as a shaping force in Russian and Soviet literature, visual culture, and social practice. Chronologically arranged chapters explain how nineteenth-century ideas about energy informed realist novels and paintings; how the poetics of energy defined pre-Revolutionary and Stalinist utopianism; and how fossil fuels, electricity, and nuclear fission generated distinct aesthetic features in Imperial Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet literature, cinema, and landscape. The volumes concentration on Russia responds to a clear need to understand the role the country plays in social, political, and economic processes endangering life on Earth today. The cultural dimension of Russias efforts at energy dominance deserves increased scholarly attention not only in its own right, but also because it directly affects global energy policy. As the contributors to this volume argue, the nationally inflected cultural myths that underlie human engagements with energy have been highly consequential in the Anthropocene. Jillian Porter is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. She is the author of Economies of Feeling: Russian Literature under Nicholas I (2017) and has published essays on money, commodities, and the queue in Russian and Soviet literature and cinema. Maya Vinokour is Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, USA. She studies Stalinist labor culture, late-Soviet science fiction, and post-Soviet media
Notes Includes index
Print version record
Subject Power resources -- Social aspects -- Russia
Power resources -- Social aspects -- Soviet Union
Power (Mechanics) in art.
Work in literature.
Work in art.
Civilization
Power (Mechanics) in art
Power resources -- Social aspects
Work in art
Work in literature
SUBJECT Russia -- Civilization -- 1801-1917. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85125715
Subject Russia
Soviet Union
Form Electronic book
Author Porter, Jillian, editor.
Vinokour, Maya, editor.
ISBN 9783031143205
3031143205