Romaniello, Matthew P. and Starks, Tricia (eds) Russian History through the Senses: From 1700 to the Present (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 560 the elections. It is therefore a pity that she seems not even to have read some of the major works written in Polish on Lithuania in this period, in particular the magisterial study by Henryk Lulewicz, which covers exactly this territory. The same can be said of the discussion of Polish government. The author claims that historians have neglected the fiscal and financial side of the problems faced by the monarchy, but the works by Anna Sucheni-Grabowska, who has analysed the finances of the monarchy and the Polish taxation system in the first half of the sixteenth century in great detail, and others who deal with the execution movement, are absent from the bibliography. There is much of interest in this book, but the execution is flawed at times. University of Aberdeen Robert Frost Romaniello, Matthew P. and Starks, Tricia (eds). Russian History through the Senses: From 1700 to the Present. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2016. xiii + 302 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. £21.99 (paperback). As the author of the Introduction to this collection, Alexander Martin, notes, any depiction of human lives would be incomplete without ‘fleeting elusive feelings and perceptions’ (p. 1). Accounting for them confronts the historian with great challenges. Following the work of the pioneer of the history of senses, the French historian Alain Corbin, Martin maintains that the senses provide ‘an avenue for understanding how people interpret, at a holistic and non-rational level, situations that are difficult or unfamiliar’ (p. 2). The Introduction gives an overview of thematic contexts of the eleven essays, thus trying to give a cohesion to the volume’s content. The essays are divided chronologically into four parts: Imperial Russia, Revolutionary Russia, Soviet Russia and Reconstructing Russia. This categorization provides the reader with little help in conceptualizing the notion of the senses. All four parts include thematically diverse material which, while presenting notable case studies, remain isolated and conceptually unintegrated. The absence of conclusion to the volume underlines the lack of theorizing of ‘the senses’ in Russian history. Romaniello’s ‘Humoral Bodies in Cold Climates’ demonstrates that over the course of the eighteenth century a belief in ‘the descriptive power of the humors’ (p. 37) persisted among Western visitors to Russia. The humoural descriptions of the environment provided foreigners with a tool to understand the influence of the climate upon the body. Alison Smith in ‘Fermentation, Taste and Identity’ demonstrates that in the nineteenth century the lines REVIEWS 561 between the ‘desirable’ and the ‘bad’, ‘pleasantly sour’ and ‘the too’ (p. 59), were based both on individual taste and on cultural norms. Such Russian foods as kvas, rye bread and fermented cabbage were considered too sour by foreigners. This perception has ‘larger implications as these products come up against the boundary of what can be considered food’ (p. 59). Abby Schrader in ‘Market Pleasures and Prostitution’ suggests that in the secularized urban culture of shopping arcades and streets of St Petersburg woman was inscribed both as consumer and commodity which made it harder ‘to tell the girl who worked from a working girl’ (p. 87). Tricia Stark’s ‘The Taste, Smell, and Semiotics of Cigarettes’ shows that at the end of the nineteenth century, brand choice of tobacco made a statement that should be viewed as a sensory performance. The smoker created a blended identity by consuming cosmopolitan brands of tobacco and ‘embodied a global, imperial vision of Russian identity’ (p. 111). Laurie Stoff’s ‘The Sounds, Odors, and Textures of Russian Wartime Nursing’ seeks ‘to integrate multiple sensory perceptions into descriptions of war experience’ (p. 119) and examines both physical and illusionary perceptions, suggesting that this helps to better understand the effect on the women who served as wartime nurses. Aaron Retish’s ‘The Taste of kumyshka and the Debate over the Udmurt Culture’ maintains that discussions of kumyshka and Udmurts in late imperial and early Soviet Russia can be understood by examining the taste of the drink. Its sensation became ‘a symbol for various social and political groups to debate the role of non-Russians (p. 157). The drink became a cultural sign of backwardness and otherness...