With political power in Russia flowing directly from the ruler to his subjects, the distinction between the public and private became porous. The identification of political rulers with fathers, and population with children created a dynamic that significantly shaped Russian attitudes and cultural practices, and tinted social conflicts with intensity of family dramas. This book examines artistic works generated by the reforms, revolutions, and other political transformations of the last two centuries, through the prism of generational interaction, illuminating and re-interpreting the frequently misunderstood or misread cultural events such as the reception of St. Petersburg, Dostoevsky’s and Bely’s novels, Stalin’s cult of personality, and Eisenstein’s films.
Table of Content
I Introduction
Pushkin and Generational Wisdom: Challenging Both the Russian Empire and Its Culture
Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons: A Parting of Ways, or The Return of the Prodigal Son?
Family and National Thought in Dostoevsky; or, The Birth of the Grand Inquisitor from the Spirit of an Accidental Family
St. Petersburg and Andrei Bely’s Petersburg through the Generational Prism
How the Revolution Devoured Its Fathers and Its Children: The Generational Dimension of Revolutionary Culture Wars
The Father Returns: Paternalism in Socialist Clothes and the Artistic Method of “Paternal Realism”
The Film Director as the Prodigal Son: Eisenstein’s Journey from Stalin to Pushkin
Afterword: Post-Stalin Generations Confronting Their Past, Present, and Future
Bibliography
About the author
Vladimir Golstein is an Associate Professor of Slavic Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Lermontov’s Narratives of Heroism, Svetlana Aleksievich—the Voice of Soviet Intelligentsia, and numerous essays on major Russian artists ranging from Pushkin to Tolstoy, and from Tsvetaeva to Tarkovsky. In 2016, he co-edited with Svetlana Evdokimova, Dostoevsky Beyond Dostoevsky: Science, Religion, Philosophy (Academic Studies Press).
More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
115,762 Ebooks in this category
