Russian Cultural Studies: An Introduction

Modern Language Review, The, Jan, 2001 by Graham Roberts

Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881-1940. Ed. by CATRIONA KELLY and DAVID SHEPHERD. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1998. xiii 358 pp. 14.99 [pounds sterling].

Russian Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Ed. by CATRIONA KELLY and DAVID SHEPHERD. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1998. xiv 428 pp. 14.99 [pounds sterling].

What is culture? What is Russian culture and how different is it from culture in the West? What is missing from current Western appropriations of Russian culture? These are the main overarching questions which these two wide-ranging, stimulating and hugely impressive volumes seek to raise and, to some extent at least, to answer. The editors of these two books, which have been conceived as companion volumes rather than as autonomous publications, leave the reader in no doubt as to their guiding principles. They bemoan what they describe as 'the gap between "literary" and "historical" appropriations of [Russian] texts' (Constructing, p. 3), and argue instead for a 'cultural studies' approach, 'in which "culture" has its anthropological sense of the totality of relations obtaining in a given society' (Constructing, p. 4). Consequently, all manner of cultural artefacts, including literary texts, film, popular song, advertising, classical music, Russian suveniry, fashionable clothes, treatises on sex education, and even the department store are viewed as 'competing but complementary discourses, linked by processes of mutual attraction and repulsion, and connected to the conditions of their production and consumption in ways that are by no means as immediate and amenable to unproblematic recuperation as has traditionally been assumed' (Constructing, p. 4).

This approach, as the editors observe, owes something to Bourdieu's notion of 'fields of cultural production'. Another premise on which it is based (less explicitly) is the Bakhtinian belief that culture is an 'unfinalized, [and] constantly developing' activity (Cultural Studies, p. 387). What results is a rich and fascinating account of Russian culture (albeit one which is heavily biased towards the twentieth century), which somehow manages to be as deep as it is broad. Ultimately, however, we are given not a comprehensive account of Russian culture (such is not the editors' intention), but rather an eloquent description of the fluidity of the boundaries operating in any society, boundaries not just between 'high' and 'low' culture, nor between different cultural practices, but also between the past and the future, 'domestic' and 'foreign', and (perhaps most significantly) individual identity and the state.

As should already be clear, both books contain a number of unconventional features. This is especially the case in Constructing (perhaps understandably so, as Cultural Studies is part of a series of volumes published by OUP looking at national cultures). Structurally, Constructing is arranged not as a neat chronological narrative, but is instead divided into three parts. The first examines the concepts of 'lichnost', 'obshchestvennost', 'sobornost', 'narodnost' and 'literaturnost' before 1881. Part Two, entitled 'Cultural Transformation in Late Imperial Russia' looks at issues as diverse as the attempt to build a 'civic' society in fin-de-siecle Russia, the doomed search for objectivity in visual and verbal texts, and the complex relationships between consumerism, language and mass culture in early twentieth-century Russia. The concluding section is an extended epilogue which focuses on the period between 1917 and 1940, in which consideration is given to such issues as the evolution of psychoanalysis, biomechanics, Fordism and other 'programmes of identity' in the burgeoning Soviet state, and the integration of commercial and cultural values in the concept of 'kul'turnost'. Cultural Studies, on the other hand, is divided into five sections, the focus of which develops progressively from high literature, through, inter alia, music, the visual arts, advertising and religion, to sexuality and youth culture. Both volumes contain a relatively high proportion of chapters written by multiple authors (at times together with the active, 'dialogic' participation of the editors), all of which helps to give them a collaborative, 'workshop' feel.

Despite the many unconventional features of both books, they are not quite as 'controversial' as is claimed on their back covers. At times, contributors make statements or express attitudes that would not be out of place in more mainstream Western accounts of Russian culture. So for example, we are informed that cultural forms are susceptible to 'political and economic pressures' (Constructing, p. 60), and that Mikhail Kuzmin's poetry is superior to the average Russian music-hall song owing to the 'vast gulf in complexity of versification and in choice of lexis' (Constructing, p. 141), while elsewhere the old equation between 'worthy' art and 'dissident' art is rehearsed in the claim that the characters in Kira Muratova's film The Sensitive Policeman (1992) endlessly parrot Soviet platitudes (Cultural Studies, p. 190). If, as Michel de Certeau has argued, rationalism has historically been conditioned by the very phenomena it has attempted to exclude (Constructing, p. 58), then much the same could be said about the attitudes to Russian culture expressed by many of the contributors to these two volumes. On the other hand, too much emphasis is sometimes placed on the context of production and consumption to the detriment of the texts themselves: it would have been interesting, for example, to learn what Roman Viktiuk's use of male actors to play the eponymous heroines of Genet's The Maids (Cultural Studies, p. 108) adds to the play itself (or, for that matter, whether it adds anything at all). Perhaps this tension between different approaches to culture should not surprise us, however. Indeed, one could argue that such diversity (to which the editors themselves allude) is to be welcomed, since it reproduces the multiplicity of discourses which have historically been found in Russian culture itself.