Bonbons and Bolsheviks: The Stigmatization of Chocolate in Revolutionary Russia

This essay examines how and why how the official Party attitude toward chocolate changed rather dramatically during the first two decades of Communist rule. In the immediate aftermath of the October 1917 Revolution, zealous and idealistic Bolsheviks, inspired in part by the ascetic model provided by Lenin himself, condemned chocolate throughout most of the 1920s as a decadent luxury food item that they associated closely with the self-indulgent consumerism and egoistic, philistine way of life enjoyed by their hated class enemy, the bourgeoisie. With the onset of Stalin’s cultural revolution in the late 1920s and early 1930s, however, chocolate suddenly became transformed into a positive symbol of the economic prosperity, material abundance, and cultural progress that the building of socialism, it was claimed, had finally achieved in Soviet Russia. My essay explores some of the reasons not just for the initial Bolshevik stigmatization of chocolate, but also for this dramatic turn around in the way chocolate was perceived subsequently by the Stalinist leadership. The focus is centered mainly on the way chocolate was represented in works of Soviet literature during both decades

Fantastic in Form, Ambiguous in Content: Secondary Worlds in Soviet Children’s Fantasy Fiction.

Siirretty Doriast

Proust-Envy: Fiction and Autobiography in the Works of Iurii Olesha

Iurii Olesha\u27s works present us with a series of episodes for a fictional autobiography: the self-portrait of the artist as failure. Already early in his career, Olesha was committed to the achievement of success through the creation and manipulation of images of failure. These images are also dominant in his last work No Day Without a Line, which this article analyzes. Olesha declares in No Day that he wishes to go backwards through life the way Marcel Proust succeeded in doing in his time. There are interesting similarities between the two writers, particularly the fact that A la Recherche du temps perdu is also in a sense based in the imagination of failure. But Olesha misunderstands Proust\u27s procedure, and in so doing reveals much about the nature of his own talent and his inability to come to terms with time

Writers take sides; letters about the war in Spain from 418 American authors

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/prism/1647/thumbnail.jp

On the Beneficence of Censorship

Lev Loseff (1937), der Leningrad 1976 verlassen musste und seit 1979 in Hannover, New Hampshire am Dartmouth College in den USA als Professor of Russian Language and Literature lehrt, hat u.a. Werke von E. Švarc, N. Olejnikov und M. Bulgakov herausgegeben. In seiner ersten großen Monographie "On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature" analysiert Loseff an Werken von Švarc, Solženicyn, Evtušenko u.a. die aus der Auseinandersetzung mit der Zensur gebotenen stilistischen - auch bereichernden - Besonderheiten der modernen, in der Sowjetunion entstandenen russischen Literatur und veranschaulicht diese im Kontext von Werk, Autor und Epoche

Charms of the Cynical Reason: Tricksters in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture

The impetus for Charms of the Cynical Reason is the phenomenal and little-explored popularity of various tricksters flourishing in official and unofficial Soviet culture, as well as in the post-Soviet era. Mark Lipovetsky interprets this puzzling phenomenon through analysis of the most remarkable and fascinating literary and cinematic images of soviet and post-Soviet tricksters, including such “cultural idioms” as Ostap Bender, Buratino, Vasilii Tyorkin, Stierlitz, and others. Soviet tricksters present survival in a cynical, contradictory, and inadequate world, not as a necessity, but as a field for creativity, play, and freedom. Through an analysis of the representation of tricksters in Soviet and post-Soviet culture, Lipovetsky attempts to draw a virtual map of the soviet and post-Soviet cynical reason: to identify its symbols, discourses, and contradictions, and by these means its historical development from the 1920s to the 2000s