Telling the People's Truth: Soviet Fairy Tale Film and the Construction of a National Bolshevik Film Genre

This study analyzes the Soviet fairy tale film genre as an expression of the ideological turn in Soviet mass culture and education from the proletarian internationalism of the 1920s to the Russo-centric statism of the Stalin period (1930s - early 1950s). The appearance of fairy tale films marks the rehabilitation of Russian folk tradition, which took place in the course of a renewed emphasis on the positive role of the Russian people and their leaders in history. By articulating contemporary cultural values and ideology in the guise of timeless folk tradition, the fairy tale film tended to legitimize and naturalize those values. By examining a representative fairy tale film from the 1930s and another from the 1960s, this study aims to show how the Soviet fairy tale film proved flexible enough to survive the transition from Stalinism to the Thaw while proving capable of articulating changing cultural values

Dostoevsky’s Capitalist Realism, or, Why Money Does Not Burn in 'The Idiot'

The Russian realist novel played a part in making the concept of the economy thinkable. This talk examines how Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1868–9) gave a narratable form to Russia’s nascent capitalist economy in the years after the emancipation of the serfs. Rather than scrupulously documenting observable economic phenomena, the novel condenses the mass of details into an economic subplot featuring a conflict between two types of wealthy characters: modern capitalists and traditional merchants. While the merchants’ wealth is shockingly material and attracts the novel’s attention, the wealth of the capitalists circulates behind the scenes, forming an invisible network that gradually takes over the novel’s world. As the conflict develops, it captures all three of the major characters in its orbit. Even Prince Myshkin, who has traditionally been seen as a being far removed from the financial excesses of 1860s St. Petersburg, is entangled in this economic conflict. Ultimately, the capitalists prosper, their lives extending beyond the novel’s narrative, the merchants are doomed to stasis, sterility, and failure.Non UBCUnreviewedFacult

Teaching Crime and Punishment in the Age of Global Capitalism

In Part V of Crime and Punishment, Katerina Ivanovna loses her apartment and finds herself on the street with her children. In this desperate situation, she forces them to perform songs in French in hopes of attracting the sympathy of passers-by at the plight of educated, noble people, as she repeatedly stresses. She insists that the sovereign will drive by and take pity on her children. Yet, as it happens, only one agent of the state becomes involved in their situation: a policeman comes to inform Katerina Ivanovna that unlicensed street performances are prohibited. The economic options for a widow and her children are exceedingly limited; Raskol’nikov’s earlier prediction that Sonia’s stepsisters are destined to lives of prostitution seems prescient. But if the situation seems desperate for women in Crime and Punishment, the major male characters—an ex-student and a former civil servant—do not fare much better. It is in fact in the expanses of time opened up by enforced idleness that these men can produce their philosophical disquisitions and plan their crimes. It seems that only new people like Luzhin, empowered by Western ideas and financial schemes, can flourish in Russia, while educated nobles sink into destitution.Non UBCUnreviewedFacult