Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev by Adele Marie s> Barker (review)

Abstract

522 SEER, 79, 3, 200I which characterized the process, suggesting that 'orders often were issued primarilyto give formalauthorizationtofaits accomplis' (p. 224). BeyondtheLimitsis marred by several dozen punctuation, spelling and grammaticalerrors,but despite the fact that most of the contributorsare not native Englishspeakersthe styleis generallyreadableand clear. Should one attempt to draw conclusions from this book about Russian space?Smith is modest in the Introduction,suggestingthat 'ambivalence'and 'contradiction' are 'perhaps the most constant theme [in the book]' (p. I4). Russia is a mysteriousland full of extremes. This is a truism,yet the pointing out of individualparadoxes is stillworthwhile. 'Space' as an explanatorytool is valuable, if understood in a limited way. Grand theories of space fail to convince, but the less ambitiouscontributionsto this volume do demonstrate that the enormous size of Russia is a significantfactorin shaping her culture, historyand politics. Department ofEuropean Studies andAIodern Languages ANNE WHITE UniversityofBath Barker,Adele Marie (ed.). Consuming Russia.Popular Culture, Sex,andSociety since Gorbachev. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, and London, I999. xiii+ 473 pp. Notes. Illustrations.Bibliography.?39.95; 1I3.50 ADELE MARIE BAKER has compiled some twenty essays on post-Soviet Russian popular culture in a volume concerned with two aspects of this growing area of study: the richness and diversity of expression in I990S society, and the question of the applicabilityof Westernculturaltheoryto Russia.The resultis a most readable, at times disparate,but illuminatingand importantcontribution to our understandingof what we can now describe as the culture of the El'tsinera. The book isdividedinto fourparts,includingBaker's'Introduction':further we are served a large and eclectic section called 'PopularCulture', covering music, popular literature, the financial pyramid MMM and its soap opera, cinema, sport, humour and dogs; then in 'Sexualities' the representationof homosexuality, male ballet and pornography;finally in 'Society and Social Artefacts' the meaning of tattoos, the interpretation of the Soviet past in society and art, the mythologizing of October I993 in graffiti,anti-Semitism and the Orthodox Church, and finally a postmodernist reading of religious 'cults'. Here is somethingforeveryone, and much interestingreading.Yetheretoo we encounter the inevitableproblem of such a wide-reachingvolume:at times one is not convinced that the selectionprocesshas achieved a coherentwhole. Therefore a chapter by Svetlana Boym on installationis of Soviet artefactsby Il'iaKabakov,who has not lived in Russia since I988, may appearsomewhat out of place, particularlyas the author considersthat 'installationsexhibited outside Russia cannot be considered part of post-Soviet popular culture' (p. 385). Nevertheless, Kabakov's work does inform one of the major and most absorbingthemes that recursthroughoutthis volume: how does culture REVIEWS 523 express itself in times of transformation? The answer in the best of the work is contradictory and equivocal. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy examines the phenomenon of Aleksandra Marinina's bestseller detective series and finds its roots in the Soviet era detective, while the woman hero at its core is new. Anastasia Kamenskaia solves murders by her intellect that astounds the men in her office who gather information for her, and yet she is in danger without their protection outside the office and when she reveals her physical beauty. As Nepomnyashchy puts it, the message is that 'it is specifically sexual autonomy that turns woman into Xvictim' (p. 174). In Laurie Essig's entertaining and thought-provoking chapter that includes tales of fieldwork in men's and women's public lavatories and 'cruising' in front of the Bolshoi Theatre, she compares the representation of homosexuality in Russia with that in the West. Essig concludes that while in the West homosexuality is treated as an identity or a subculture, in Russia it is a 'subjectivity', a flexible space that does not usually involve self-definition as 'gay' or 'lesbian' (pp. 282-83). Homosexuality in Russia is not an identity but a 'practice' (p. 29I), and it has reached the popular sphere through it being consumed, and portrayed through the 'Trojan Horse' of 'true art' and 'true love' (p. 298). The relativity of the meaning of language is a focus of Eliot Borenstein's imaginative exploration of the 'cult' of the White Brotherhood. As official Kiex braced itself for a suicide of 144,000 followers of this religious group as the end of the world neared in November I993...