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 volume’s 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 Russia’s 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.
Author(s): Jillian Porter, Maya Vinokour
Series: Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 344
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Energy Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union
Chapter 2: The Energy of Chernyshevsky’s Vera Pavlovna in the Modern Cultural Economy
Cultural Signposts of Popular Science
The Scientistic Framework of What Is to Be Done?
The Neuroelectricity of Progress
Cultural Economy and Women’s Prose
What Is to Be Done? and (Print)-Capitalism
Chapter 3: The Energy Trap: Anna Karenina as a Parable for the Twenty-First Century
Thermodynamics as Cultural Context
Narrative Energy
Narrative Entropy
Conclusion
Chapter 4: Picturing Coal in the Donbas: Nikolai Kasatkin and the Energy of Late Realism
Life Underground
Artificial Light, Natural Dark
Paint It Black
Chapter 5: Polar Fantasies: Valery Bryusov and the Russian Symbolist Electric Aesthetic
The Electric Sublime: The Symbolic Power of Electric Light
The Russian Electric Aesthetic: From Utopianism to Symbolism
Lyric Electricity in Bryusov’s Urban Poetry
Polar Fantasies and Electric Science Fiction
Chapter 6: Energetic Liquids in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Utopianism
Introduction
The Biocentric Labor Discipline of Fedorov’s “Common Task”
Russian Cosmism in the Works of Maxim Gorky and Alexander Bogdanov
Conclusion
Chapter 7: Revolutionary Burnout and the Rise of the Soviet Rest Regime
Chapter 8: The Mechanics and Energetics of Soviet Communism: The Poetics of Peat
Mechanics
Energetics
Resistance of Material
Conclusions
Chapter 9: Leonid Brezhnev and the Elixir of Life
The Sovereign’s Body
The Social Body
The Elixir of Life
The Soviet Methuselah
Dreams of Death
Rejections of Life Extension
Conclusion: A Rotten Stump
Chapter 10: Russian Oil: Tragic Past, Radiant Future, and the Resurrection of the Dead
Toward a Cultural Phenomenology of Oil
The Dialectics of Soviet Oil
Chapter 11: Of Mice and Degenerators: Post-progress Energy and Posthuman Bodies in Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx
Nuclear Energy
Gasoline
Books
Chapter 12: Hydrocarbons on Hold: Energy Aesthetics of Teriberka in the Russian Arctic
The Powerful Work of Energy
Latent Energy on the Arctic Edge
Energy Aesthetics in Teriberka, Russia
Latent Energy Aesthetic
Nature’s Spiritual Energy Aesthetic
“New Life” Aesthetic
Conclusion
Chapter 13: Afterword on Chernobyl (2019): A Soviet Propaganda Win Delivered 33 Years Late
Index
