Synopses & Reviews
Both before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, everyday life and the domestic sphere served as an ideological battleground, simultaneously threatening Stalinist control and challenging traditional Russian gender norms that had been shaken by the Second World War.
The Prose of Life examines how six female authors employed images of daily life to depict women’s experience in Russian culture from the 1960s to the present.
Byt, a term connoting both the everyday and its many petty problems, is an enduring yet neglected theme in Russian literature: its very ordinariness causes many critics to ignore it. Benjamin Sutcliffe’s study is the first sustained examination of how and why everyday life as a literary and philosophical category catalyzed the development of post-Stalinist Russian women’s prose, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
A focus on the representation of everyday life in women’s prose reveals that a first generation of female writers (Natal’ia Baranskaia, Irina Grekova) both legitimated and limited their successors (Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Tat’iana Tolstaia, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and Svetlana Vasilenko) in their choice of literary topics. The Prose of Life traces the development, and intriguing ruptures, of recent Russian women’s prose, becoming a must-read for readers interested in Russian literature and gender studies.
2009 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine
Review
andldquo;Olson and Adonyeva skillfully interweave fieldwork data with historical background, theoretical connections, and interpretation. In-depth and balanced, the book covers a number of important topics: the village life cycle, magic and healing, gossip and consumption of mass media, and womenandrsquo;s relationship to both traditional and popular music.andrdquo;andmdash;Sibelan E. S. Forrester, Swarthmore College
Review
“Sutcliffe lifts women’s writing out of a category to which it was long consigned and shows how their works, grounded in everyday life, address larger issues in Soviet and post-Soviet society that transcend the gender divisions within Russian and Soviet literature.”—Adele Barker, University of Arizona
Review
“A significant contribution to Slavic women’s studies. Sutcliffe’s nuanced chronological overview is unmatched for this topic, and his excellent close readings yield many valuable insights.”—Natasha Kolchevska, University of New Mexico
Review
andldquo;Rather than constructing an outsiderandrsquo;s image of the Russian countryside, as has been done countless times before, the authors instead capture the self-images of Russian village women themselves, achieving a nuanced portrait of their multi-layered, self-constructed modern identities.andrdquo;andmdash;
ChoiceReview
andldquo;This work is a good combination of richly contextualized ethnographic descriptions and interpretive analysis. It opens the world of rural Russia to English-speaking readers.andrdquo;andmdash;Mariya Lesiv,
Slavic and Eastern European Journaland#160;Synopsis
Russian rural women have been depicted as victims of oppressive patriarchy, celebrated as symbols of inherent female strength, and extolled as the original source of a great world culture. Throughout the years of collectivization, industrialization, and World War II, women played major roles in the evolution of the Russian village. But how do they see themselves? What do their stories, songs, and customs reveal about their values, desires, and motivations?
and#160;and#160; and#160;Based upon nearly three decades of fieldwork, from 1983 to 2010, The Worlds of Russian Rural Women follows three generations of Russian women and shows how they alternately preserve, discard, and rework the cultural traditions of their forebears to suit changing needs and self-conceptions. In a major contribution to the study of folklore, Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva document the ways that womenandrsquo;s tales of traditional practices associated with marriage, childbirth, and death reflect both upholding and transgression of social norms. Their romance songs, satirical ditties, and healing and harmful magic reveal the complexity of power relations in the Russian villages.
Synopsis
The Prose of Life examines how six female authors employed images of daily life to depict women’s experience in Russian culture from the 1960s to the present.
About the Author
Laura J. Olson is associate professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Svetlana Adonyeva is professor of folklore and theory of literature at St. Petersburg State University in Russia.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise1 Traditions of Patriarchy and the Missing Female Voice in Russian Folklore Scholarship2 Age and Gender Status and Identity: Structure and History3 Subjectivity and the Relational Self in Soviet Rural Women's Stories of Courtship and Marriage4 The Pleasure, Power, and Nostalgia of Melodrama: Twentieth-Century Singing Traditions and Women's Identity Construction5 Transgression as Communicative Act: Rural Women's Chastushki6 Magical Forces and the Symbolic Resources of Motherhood7 Magic, Control, and Social Roles8 Constructing Identity in Stories of the Other World9 Death, the Dead, and Memory-KeepersConclusionand#160;NotesReferencesInde