Pop Culture Russia! Media, Arts, and Lifestyle by Birgit Beumers (review)

Abstract

786 SEER, 85, 4, OCTOBER 2007 Beumers, Birgit. Pop CultureRussia! Media, Arts, and Lifestyle.Popular Culture in the Contemporary World. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, CA, Denver, CO and Oxford, 2005. xxxi + 399 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliographical references. Glossary. Index. ?62.50. The editors of the series Popular Culture in theContemporary World empha size that its remit is to appeal to travellers and general readers, as well as to students of a particular culture. Birgit Beumers' contribution to the series, Pop CultureRussia! Media, Arts, and Lifestyle,is an accessible, informative and entertaining read and achieves this aim. It is also a valuable resource for students of late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian culture. The book is comprehensive in its selection of different spheres of contemporary life,with chapters dealing with theMedia, Visual Culture, Performing Arts, Music and Word, Popular Entertainment and Consumer Culture. The Introduction provides a clear and incisive account of the uses of culture during the entire Soviet era and up to the present day. Beumers takes the opportunity to situate terms such as 'popular', 'mass' and 'commercial' within the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts, explanations which serve the reader well in the thematic sections. In her Visual Culture chapter, Beumers gives a coherent sense of developments in film in the post-Soviet market and the role of animated films in Russian culture; she also deals with architecture, arts and crafts and icons. Under Performing Arts come theatre, estrada and the circus, as well as an excellent section on anecdotes and jokes. Consumer Culture includes an insightfuldiscussion of advertising and a survey of aspects of everyday life such as food, leisure, fashion and contemporary folk belief. Each of the chapters balances concise and coherent narrative of the cultural changes of the past thirtyyears with reference to historical events, public figures and appropriate case studies. The historical overview section that begins each chapter is crucial in explaining the institutions, individuals and practices that governed a given cultural sphere during zastoi, and enables the reader to make greater sense of the changes that began under Gorbachev and the shiftsthat continue to the present day. The chapter on theMedia is characteristic in its impressive handling of a huge amount of information. It provides an informative and nuanced narrative of a heady series of events, while working in small but memorable details ? the role played by references to advertising for Snickers in the construction of the public profiles of both Zhirinovskii and Putin (pp. 27, 29, 319-20) being one such example. The privileging of lyrics in some genres of popular music remains an important idiosyncrasy of contemporary Russian culture, and Beumers' chapter on Music and Word provides several song lyricsby bards and rock groups in translation. The emphasis here is on the glory days of perestroika era rock. This chapter might not seem themost natural place for a discussion of slang,which plays a part inmany other manifestations of the popular too, but the examination of youth culture and language iswell informed and com prehensive. Related to this is a very good working definition of the form of straight-faced mockery of sacred cows, known in Russian as steb; the impact REVIEWS 787 of steb,too, isby no means confined to theworld of rockmusic. The intention of theMusic and Word chapter is to reveal the origins of contemporary pop music 'on the one hand in the official Soviet pop culture of the 1960s and 1970s (estrada) and on the other hand in the underground bard and rock movement' (p. 199). This is a crucial undertaking and the account of Soviet popular music, official and non-official, iswide-ranging and lucid.One minor omission is the explanation of the institution of the state-licensed vokal'no instrumental'nyi ansambl' ? despite not defining this phenomenon, Beumers occasionally uses the acronym 'VIA'. Nonetheless, the chapter provides a much-needed account of theway inwhich both official and unofficial Soviet culture played a part in shaping post-Soviet trends. It also introduces an interesting discussion of the importance of gender, sexuality and transgression in the lyricsand visual culture of rock and pop since the 1980s. One of the real successes of Pop CultureRussia!, especially as a...