Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood

Myths and Realities

Marina Balina, Larissa Rudova, Anastasia Kostetskaya, Marina Balina, Larissa Rudova, Anastasia Kostetskaya

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032227993
  9781032227962
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000780727
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood is a collection of multidisciplinary scholarly essays on childhood experience. The volume offers new critical approaches to Russian and Soviet childhood at the intersection of philosophy, literary criticism, film/visual studies, and history. Pedagogical ideas and practices, and the ideological and political underpinnings of the experience of growing up in pre-revolutionary Russia, the Soviet Union, and Putin's contemporary Russia are central venues of analysis. Toward the goal of constructing the "multimedial childhood text," the contributors tackle issues of happiness and trauma associated with childhood and foreground its fluidity and instability in the Russian context. The volume further examines practices of reading childhood: as nostalgic text, documentary evidence, and historic mythology. Considering Russian childhood as historical documentation or fictional narrative, as an object of material culture, and as embodied in different media (periodicals, visual culture, and cinema), the volume intends to both problematize but also elucidate the relationship between childhood, history, and various modes of narrativity.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction: The World of Russian Childhood
• Part I Myths and Realities of Russian Childhood
• Part II Revolutionary Changes
• Part III Narratives of Trauma
• Part IV Shifting Paradigms of Russian Childhood
• Index