Performing Russia: Folk Revival and Russian Identity

by Laura Olson

Overview

This book examines folk music and dance revival movements in Russia, exploring why this folk culture has come to represent Russia, how it has been approached and produced, and why memory and tradition, in these particular forms, have taken on particular significance in different periods. Above all it shows how folk "tradition" in Russia is an artificial cultural construct, which is periodically reinvented, and it demonstrates in particular how the "folk revival" has played a key role in strengthening Russian national consciousness in the post-Soviet period.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415406178
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	01/22/2004
Series:	BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Laura J. Olson is Assistant Professor of Russian at the University of Colarado, Boulder. She has been researching and performing Slavic folk music since 1987.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1. The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music in Pre-Revolutionary Russia 2. A Unified National Style: Folklore Performance in the Soviet Context 3. The Origins of the Russian Folk Revival Movement 4. Revival and Identity after Socialism 5. Power and Ritual: Russian Nationalism and Representations of the Folk, Orthodoxy, Imperial Russia and the Cossackry 6. Performing Masculinity: Cossack Myth and Reality in Post-Soviet Revival Movements 7. The Village Revives 8. Making Memory: How Urban Intellectuals Re-invent Russian Village Traditions

Editorial Reviews

'This book offers valuable insights into post-Soviet Russian society, culture, and grass-roots political developments.' - MLR, 102.1, 2007

 

'Olsen has a talent for clear exposition and cogent summary, as she shows in her survey of the appropriation of folk song in the eighteenth century by the literate classes and the main trends in folk-song performance in the nineteenth.'

- MLR, 102.1, 2007

From the Publisher