Academic literature on the topic 'European and Soviet'

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of History, 2005.<br>Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-04, Section: A, page: 1467. Adviser: Toivo U. Raun. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed Nov. 9, 2006)."

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of History, 2005.<br>Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Dec. 2, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-02, Section: A, page: 0725. Chair: Alexander Rabinowitch.

<p> This dissertation investigates how the Holocaust and postwar sovietization shaped the dynamics of Jewish communities and ordinary life in southwestern Ukraine. I examine the relationship between state policy and the sphere of Jewish religious practice. Two research questions motivated this study: (1) What was the trajectory of the lives of Eastern European Jews who came back from Nazi concentration camps? and (2) How did Jews negotiate their religious and public identities in an everyday setting? To examine these questions, the study illuminates the postwar life of one group of Jewish Holocaust survivors in the periphery of the Soviet Union. Literature on postwar Soviet Jewry has focused almost exclusively on the lives of elites in the center. This study enhances our understanding of Jewish integration into Soviet society. </p><p> I used oral history, collected during my own ethnographic fieldwork in Israel and Ukraine, as well as state archives to analyze processes of return and integration. Interviews with ordinary people permit a social perspective on political developments and communal reconstruction. Statistical data and official communication provide the framework necessary to show the dynamics of Jewish life. Combining archival material with oral history demonstrates that the impact of Soviet rule on Jewish life after World War II is more complex than previously portrayed. Topics examined include the liberation from Nazi concentration camps, arrival experiences in Transcarpathia, the reconstruction of private and public Jewish life in the late 1940s and everyday Jewish practice in the 1950s and early 60s. </p><p> Ordinary Jews fully integrated into society, succeeded in their careers and expressed their Jewish identity through religious practice. The findings include individual negotiation of demands in secular society and the methods of circumventing obstacles that restricted religious practice. The analysis of the interviews, however, prompts a reconsideration of postwar Soviet Jewish life with regard to persecution and emigration narratives.</p>

Since its inception in 1918, Soviet children’s literature was acclaimed as innovative and exciting, often in contrast to other official Soviet literary production. Indeed, avant-garde artists worked in this genre for the entire Soviet period, although they had fallen out of official favor by the 1930s. This dissertation explores the relationship between the childlike aesthetic as expressed in Soviet children’s literature, the early Russian avant-garde and later post-war unofficial poetry. Even as ‘childlike’ devices were exploited in different ways in different contexts, in the post-war period the characteristic features of this aesthetic had come to be a marker for unofficial art. The introduction presents the notion of the childlike aesthetic, tracing its recent history from Russian modernism and the avant-garde. Chapter One, “Detki v kletke: The Underground Goes into Children’s Literature,” traces the early development of Soviet children’s literature and introduces the work of the OBERIU poets, the “first underground” to be driven by circumstance to write for children. Chapter Two, “‘Playing with Words’: Experimental Unofficial Poetry and Children’s Literature in the Post-war Period,” fast-forwards to the late 1950s-70s, describing the emergence of a more substantial unofficial literary scene alongside still-rigid boundaries within official literature, including children’s. The final two chapters present detailed comparative studies of the work of two post-war unofficial poets from each of the Soviet ‘capitals,’ Moscow and Leningrad: Igor Kholin and Vsevolod Nekrasov, and Leonid Aronzon and Oleg Grigoriev. All of these poets worked in children’s literature and experimented with the childlike aesthetic in their unofficial work. With its roots in folklore, nonsense poetry and nursery rhymes, the childlike aesthetic challenges established notions of logic, propriety and order. Through childlike form and content, unofficial poetry could distinguish itself starkly from its official counterpart. Furthermore, unofficial writers who worked in children’s literature could demonstratively ignore the strict generic boundaries of official literature by blurring them through their own, openly childlike poetry. This dissertation attests to the expressive power, resilience and ongoing relevance of the childlike aesthetic in art, while showing the curious intermingling of literary experiment and children’s literature in Soviet literary history.<br>Slavic Languages and Literatures

The Soviet political photomontage, as a turn “from faktura to factography,” is sometimes viewed as a compromise that the constructivists had to make to meet the aesthetic and informational needs of their new audience, the proletarian masses. I argue that it was an expansion of the constructivist paradigm, and that throughout the 1920s Soviet photomontage was not only feeding on the principles of analytical art, but in a sense became their ultimate expression. Gustav Klucis, a pioneer of the Soviet political photomontage, and the hero of my dissertation, stated in his theoretical writings, that photomontage is the form of analytical art. The hybrid genre of photomontage was in fact a result of the constructuvists’ search for an adequate form to interpret political reality. In the case of Klucis photomontage was anything but a direct and simple agitational genre. I prove that in Klucis’s agitational photomontage the radical constructivist form and the factographic material were organically intertwined. There was never a forced incorporation of ideology into an elaborate geometric construction. On the contrary, contemporary life and current political events captured by the artist-photographer’s camera, served as a catalyst for invention of new forms. I argue that the political photo-slogan-montage invented by Klucis emerged from his earlier experimental “small architecture” created in 1922: agitational kiosks, stands for slogans, podiums, and ‘radio-orators.’ I focus in particular on the series of Klucis’s constructivist photomontages of the 1920s: illustrations to Molodaya Gvardia, and the series of illustrations to Mayavovsky’s poem Lenin. The idea of depicting Lenin as iconoclast and the productivist artists’ ally in their project of rebuilding the entire world led Klucis to challenge the boundaries of his art. The Lenin series, one of the most complex examples of constructivist photomontage of the 1920s, demonstrates close affinities of photomontage with the avant-garde poetry of Mayakovsky, the constructivist theater of Vsevolod Meyerhold and set designer Liubov Popova, and Dziga Vertov’s avant-garde film.<br>Slavic Languages and Literatures

Kinocuban: the significance of Soviet and East European cinemas for the Cuban moving image examines a piece of evidence that has been misunderstood in the existing body of Cuban film studies. The first revolutionary legislation concerning the arts was the creation of the ICAIC in 1959, a fact that demonstrates the importance of cinema for the new cultural project. This thesis argues that the moving image was radically affected by the proclamation of the socialist character of the Revolution on 16 April 1961. What was it that the distant audiovisual culture, film theories and practices of the Soviet-bloc offered Cubans? Is it not the case that Soviet-bloc cinemas had an influence upon the shaping of the Cuban moving image, if one takes into consideration the very few films co-produced in 30 years? It should be stressed that during this period, the moving image was the direct or indirect effect of the different waves that arrived in Cuba from ‘the other’ Europe, which were born at the same time as the first films that were co-produced in the 1960s, particularly from the unique experience of Mikhail Kalatozov’s masterpiece Soy Cuba. The present study reveals that the most important outcome from that influence was the conceptualisation of the cinematic discourse of the Revolution, so well represented in ICAIC and its socialist films of commitment. The experience included the introduction of new practices in television in order ‘to de-colonize’ the moving image. KinoCuban analyses the impact on four main subjects: film theory and criticism; film administration; the filmmakers’ works (films, videos, and television practices) and the spectator. KinoCuban works within the area of postcolonial studies and takes Ortiz’s transculturation as its starting point. KinoCuban argues that the experience was a process of give and take, thus ‘lo exacto es hablar de continuidad’.