Stories and Voices: History and Theory

Abstract

In the last few years, critical cultural theory has had an impact on the study and interpretation of the Russian past comparable only to the earlier entry into the field of social history. The three articles under discussion here reflect this methodological shift and merit discussion against this background. Encouraged by arguments and approaches developed mainly in structuralist and poststructuralist philosophy and literary theory,' in interpretive cultural anthropology and sociology,2 and in recent cultural studies of European history,3 a growing number of historians and literary scholars (including many doctoral candidates completing their dissertations) are fashioning a cultural history of the Russian experience that is important both in the substance of what it tells us about the past and in its methodological revisionism. Among the many historical studies in this genre recently presented in print or at conferences are to be found investigations of the popular press and literature, mass entertainment, lower-class reading and authorship, and political ceremony and iconography; interpretive cultural studies of funerals, advertising, suicide, prostitution, and practices of everyday life; and examinations of discourse concerning such matters as gender, sexuality, religion, class, nationality, the individual, childhood, the city, nature, and the idea of culture itself.4 This florescence of cultural study has already enriched our empirical knowledge about the Russian and Soviet past. It has also often led to the revision of older interpretations. Equally important, this work has challenged the methods used to recover and interpret that past. This cultural study of the past has been variously ridiculed as trendiness and