Svetlana Boym Research Articles

“Europeans without Euros”: Alternative Narratives of Europe’s ‘New Happiness’

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, belles paroles such as ‘Europe without borders’ and ‘the family of European nations’ announced in discourse - if not in reality – the ‘reunification of Europe.’ However, as the years of perpetual transition wore on, many Eastern European writers and intellectuals began to suggest Anschluss as a more appropriate description of East-West rapprochement. In fiction and in feuilletons, these writers and intellectuals pointed to the fact that while communism may have become water over the dam, generations of Eastern Europeans, unable to find their feet in the new circumstances, were drowning in the flood of Europe’s ‘new happiness.’ This paper considers Dubravka Ugrešić’s novel Ministarstvo boli (The Ministry of Pain, 2004) and Milan Kundera’s L’ignorance (Ignorance, 2000) as alternative narratives of the post-Wende years; attempts to articulate the experiences of those whom Svetlana Boym would call “Europeans without euros.”

Resurrecting the Nomads: Historical Nostalgia and Modern Nationalism in Contemporary Kazakh Popular Music Videos

This article analyzes three recent music videos by several Kazakh1 popular musicians: the multinational artist Batyrkhan Shukenov, the ethno-pop band Urker, and the young dombra (two-string lute) virtuoso Asylbek Engsepov. These videos, all produced since 2002, reflect varying degrees of historical nostalgia and nationalism through music and images of Kazakh traditional culture, creating powerful messages of Kazakh national identity for contemporary audiences in Kazakhstan. Drawing upon historian Ronald Gregor Suny's concept of a national “narrative” and Svetlana Boym's notion of “restorative nostalgia,” the article interrogates the types of images used and the reactions that they inspire in their audiences. The article examines not only issues of national identity construction and musical nation-building, but also probes the political motivations and implications of state involvement in the propagation of Kazakh musical nationalism in a multicultural, post-Soviet Kazakhstan. [1] Note on Romanization: I have transliterated all Kazakh-language terminology according to conventions most commonly used in English-language publications, versus the outdated Library of Congress system that has become too cumbersome for the modern scholar. I have transliterated the words “Kazakh” and “Kazakhstan” from the Russian-language terms kazakh (κaзax) and Kazakhstan (κaзaxctah) because these versions are more familiar to general readers.

Researching Place, Emplacing the Researcher: Reflections on the Making of a Documentary on a Pilgrimage Confraternity

This essay reflects on the roles of the researcher, gender, place, and nostalgia in the making of an ethnographic documentary film on a contemporary pilgrimage confraternity. Every year the group visits Oyama, a sacred mountain in central Kanagawa Prefecture, on the occasion of the mountain-opening ceremony on 27 July. The Ohana Confraternity mainly consists of members working at two manufacturing companies in Tokyo. A sense of belonging to the group is mostly based on professional and personal relationships rather than a common sense of faith. The yearly pilgrimage is an example of how contemporary corporations use religious rituals to foster social relations and promote a productive work ethic among their employees. The presence of a foreign researcher and a local archivist influenced the ritual activities of the confraternity in many, sometimes unexpected, ways. Gender determined the place of individual members (including the researcher) in the group and their mode of association with the confraternity. The group's approach to traditions and rituals of the pilgrimage was nostalgic yet playful and malleable. KEYWORDS: Oyama-Ohanako-yamabiraki-misogi-furi Shrine-Fudo Myoo- kekkai-nyonin kinsei-nostalgia (ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.) Place, in whatever guise, is like space and time, a social construct. This is the baseline proposition from which I start. The only interesting question that can then be asked is: by what social process(es) is place constructed? David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time-the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia ACCORDING to M. Eliade, sacred places are sanctified through hierophany, a divine manifestation empowering this-worldly space with other-worldly qualities. An Eliadian sacred place is timeless and divorced from profane places (Eliade 1961, 20-29). This Eliadian understanding of the sacred has colored the ways in which scholars of Japanese religion have viewed sacred mountains in Japan. For example, the folklorist Hori Ichiro proposed three basic typological aspects of mountain cults in Japan. The first is the veneration of volcanoes and other conically shaped mountains as the residence or embodiment of the divine. Second, mountains were revered as watersheds and sources of water, fertility and, by implication, material wealth. Third, mountains were regarded as the realm of spirits and the dead. As abodes of divinities, spirits, and the dead, mountains were regarded as portals to other worlds or as an axis mundi, the embodiment of the entire universe like the mythical Buddhist peak Mt. Sumeru (Hori 1966, 1-23). During the past few decades, scholars of cultural geography, cultural anthropology, and religious studies have questioned the timelessness of sacred places and the rigid distinction of the sacred and the profane posited by Eliade. Instead they have suggested that sacred places are culturally and socially constructed.1 John Eade and Michael Sallnow, for example, argue for an approach to the study of pilgrimage sites that shifts the focus from the place to the person: pilgrimage shrines are sites where divergent religious discourses collide as pilgrims and shrine authorities each aim to assert their meanings and perceptions (Eade and Sallnow 1991, 5.10). This essay is a case study of a sacred mountain in central Kanagawa Prefecture on the western edge of the Kant. Plain that is a popular regional pilgrimage and hiking destination. This mountain, Oyama, serves as an illuminating example of how a sacred place is maintained and created in a complex process that involves pilgrims, innkeepers, priests, and researchers. In this sense, many divergent voices continually negotiate the meanings of Oyama's social and physical space. …

Tizita: A New World Interpretation

Tizita: A New World Interpretation1 Dagmawi Woubshet (bio) Tinan’tenan t’so, zaren tentereso Kenegem teweso, amna’nem adeso Yemetal tizita gwazun agbesbeso Outdoing yesterday, shouldering on today, Borrowing from tomorrow, renewing yesteryears, Comes tizita hauling possessions. —Tizita Lyric2 This essay stems from a yearning to connect poetic practices across boundaries, linking Africa and its Diaspora—by seeking out and fingering the gap that dislocation prompts; by redirecting one’s own unmoored tongue, which, like water (to borrow from Toni Morrison) “is forever trying to get back to where it was.”3 In the New World, Ethiopians are late-Diaspora people. For that reason, it would be ahistorical to compare Ethiopian and New World poetics in the ways usually framed by critics and writers of the African Diaspora. One can’t assume, for example, that the Middle Passage is the only context. Nor can one succumb to the seductions of Ethiopia as it’s romanticized in pan-African discourse, a discourse that has elevated it and constructed its apotheosis, restoration, and return. Nor can such a linking of traditions rely on a transnational, racial nationalism to do all the thinking. Instead, I want to extend the reaches of diasporic discourse—and to free up the Ethiopia that is under romantic arrest—by making a suggestive translation, using an element of Ethiopian poetic tradition as a point of reference. In that effort, I bear with me what Ethiopians call tizita to offer a reading of an African-American novel: James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head. In Amharic, the word tizita has three related meanings. It can mean, in the first place, memory and the act of memory. Some dictionaries parenthetically add nostalgia, or the [End Page 629] memory of loss and longing—and nostalgia certainly evokes the word’s attendant mood, its melancholy, discernible in the way Amharic speakers employ it even in their most quotidian exchanges. Secondly, tizita refers to one of the scales or modes in secular Ethiopian music, one that conjures up in sonic terms the word’s dictionary meaning. Thirdly, and incorporating the two, tizita refers to a signature ballad in the Amharic songbook, which always takes the form of an expression of loss. At bottom, tizita is a ballad about the memory of love loss. The lovelorn singer takes up the departed lover as the subject and, simultaneously, the unrelieved memory of loss that the lover’s departure has prompted. Tizita often begins as an apostrophe, a direct address to both the absent lover and memory as a personified abstraction: Tizita’ye antewneh, tizitam yelebgn Tizita’ye antewneh, tizitam yelebgn Emetalhu eyalk, eyekereh’ebgn My tizita is you, I don’t have tizita My tizita is you, I don’t have tizita You say you’re coming, yet you never do Amharic thrives on polysemy. Here the possessive tizita’ye, my tizita, refers to the singer’s own melancholy memory, but also to the absent lover, since in Amharic the possessive is an ornament placed around certain nouns—“my” love, beauty, life, memory—to show affection in addressing a beloved. The second clause in the first two lines contains another generic trope—the singer’s disavowal of all memory but that of love loss—which positions lack and longing as the song’s spatial and temporal coordinates (lack is “here,” longing is “then”). The third line—the absent lover’s empty promise of a return—reprises and affirms the longing stated ambiguously at first. The longing in tizita is without resolution, since the possibility of restoration or return is always thwarted. Unlike other acts of nostalgia that “try to repair longing with belonging,” tizita is akin to what Svetlana Boym terms reflective nostalgia, which “thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately.”4 Tizita is to be longing.5 Like the blues, tizita keeps alive the apprehension of loss, and even when it reaches to overcome it, does so “not by the consolation of philosophy,” as Ralph Ellison puts it, but “by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”6 At its worst, a tizita ballad is sappy, enamored of its own sentimental excesses. At its...

Islands of Detroit: Affect, Nostalgia and Whiteness

‘Islands of Detroit’ explores the possibilities for an ‘everyday, oppositional whiteness’, a thoughtful randomness, as a corrective to ‘reactionary’ and ‘evasive’ forms of whiteness which often embed themselves in populist media sites for nostalgia. Drawing on the theoretical work of Svetlana Boym, Uday Singh Mehta and Roland Barthes, this essay looks in particular at a coffee table book, The Way it Was (2004), and its generic sentimentalism, to understand how certain white visual representations of Detroit affectively generate nostalgia, which can in turn conceal pasts and racial tensions. Looking at the history of Detroit (with particular attention on how the two infamous race riots are and are not negotiated), Islands examines visual images of the city – as opposed to the city itself – through the discursive lenses of nostalgia, modernity and affect, while positing that the histories and identities of Detroit remain irreducible to the images which attempt to capture them.

History's Place: Nostalgia and the City in French Algerian Literature, by Seth Graebner

Reviewed by: History’s Place: Nostalgia and the City in French Algerian Literature Peter Dunwoodie History’s Place: Nostalgia and the City in French Algerian Literature By Seth Graebner. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. 356 pp. ISBN 978-0-7391-1582-4 paper. Seth Graebner sets out a number of objectives in this study of Algerian literature: the exploration of the manifestations of nostalgia for vanished cultures and places, regarded as one of the defining tropes of the relationship between France and North Africa and seen as taking the Algerian city as a privileged place for debates about the relationship between literary and historical discourses; the study of particular places, as a basis for a consideration of “the dialogue between literature ‘high’ and ‘low,’ and history popular and academic” (2); analysis of essays, newspapers, and fiction in order to reveal how Algeria “developed a historical consciousness through literature” (4); along with an attempt to historicize debates over the identity of the colony, debates argued in terms of urban history. Given the range of authors and historical periods covered—from Louis Bertrand at the [End Page 180] turn of the twentieth century, via the Algerianists, Audisio, Camus, and Robles, to two of Algeria’s most radical writers of the postcolonial period, Kateb Yacine and Rachid Boudjedra—some of these objectives are at times inapplicable, at times restrictive when not treated in relation to other topoi that are, nevertheless, key elements of the conflicted imaginary geography of colonial Algeria (e.g., the rouliers’ interior for Bertrand, the settler’s bled for the Algerianists, an expansive “Mediterranean” for Audisio and Camus). When, however, the focus is squarely on urban space (Algiers and modernity, Oran, the Casbah) or specific aspects thereof (e.g., the architectural style known as arabisance), it clearly shows the colonial city to be both an icon of the European presence and a site of conflict/negotiation. It is sometimes well served here by Graebner’s use of the notion of “restorative” and “reflective” nostalgia developed in Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (2001)—used as an alternative, no doubt, to established approaches like that of Edward Said or Pierre Nora (whose concept of lieux de mémoire) is critiqued in the closing chapter). Frequently, however, history’s not always nostalgic place gives way to a much wider perspective, when Graebner retraces, for instance, the ideological underpinnings of Bertrand’s “Latin Africa,” the politics of the Centenary, Ferdinand Duchêne’s anti-Kabyle discourse, or Roblès’s Spanishness. The analyses and conclusions adduced here will be familiar to readers of the two books of the 1990s that countered the strategic amnesia that had, until then, erase colonial writing in France and Algeria: La littérature algérienne de l’entre-deux-guerres (Lanasri, 1995) and Writing French Algeria (Dunwoodie, 1998). The decision to extend the study to incorporate the postcolonial period (via Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma and Boudjedra’s Topographie idéale pour une aggression caractérisé) gives rise to closely argued readings, but exposes History’s Place to the risk of generating in the unwary reader a false sense of continuity, since it is not accompanied by a detailed account of the fundamental shift (psychological, political, ideological) that transformed colonial relations during World War II and the events of 1945, seedbed of the armed conflict launched in 1954. In short, am ambitious undertaking that, where well focused, adds a great deal to our understanding of Algerian literature’s engagement with the colonial city. Peter Dunwoodie Goldsmiths, University of London Works Cited Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic, 2001. Google Scholar Lanasri, Ahmed. La littérature algérienne de l’entre-deux-guerres. Paris: Publisud, 1995. Google Scholar Dunwoodie, Peter. Writing French Algeria. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. [End Page 181] Google Scholar Copyright © 2008 Indiana University Press

Restoration, Metanostalgia, and Critical Memory: Forms of Nostalgia in Contemporary Southern Poetry

White southerners and their literature traditionally have been known for nostalgia (sometimes even defined by it), and contemporary southern poetry does not escape its influence. In fact, nostalgia is arguably most prevalent paradigm of current southern poetics, even as much post-World War II verse works in contrast pathos-laden view of past. A collection of recent southern poets--including those under analysis in this article, George Scarbrough, Donald Justice, and Henry Taylor--make use of inheritance of southern nostalgia, though not necessarily in traditional ways. They demonstrate nostalgia remains driving force in poetry of postwar era even or especially as U.S. South begins operate under shifting conditions of trans-southernism: increased (sub)urbanization, influence of late capitalism, pressures of racial conflict manifested in civil rights movement and continuing efforts at desegregation, as well as claims of current identity politics. Though at times their poetic measures can become reactionary measures, preserving mummified past from such cultural transitions, these poets also show signs of more jagged nostalgia, one struggles come terms with this changing South: old times there are not forgotten, hut re-viewed with different, even distrustful eye. Southern nostalgia can take seemingly innocuous form of moonlight-and-magnolias yearning for more peaceful and reassuring past, often centered on wish return homestead, physical and symbolic space merges southern staples of ties family and place, perhaps intensifying into shrine for ancestor worship. Such pining for more organic time and place may seem harmless enough, but it can also take on ideological import; for retreating into past can elide pressing social realities of present. This is apparent in ongoing conflicts over politics of nostalgia for Lost Cause, seen most vividly in continuing battle over flying of Confederate flag on South Carolina State House grounds. Waxing nostalgic can be racially inflected and politically weighted act. Nostalgia's backward-glancing would seem run counter continuously shifting identifications of increasingly transregional and global world, forming conservative defense mechanism against contemporary culture's overflow of meanings by positing singular meaningfulness of sturdy, unified past. A starting point in defining nostalgia might be Michael Kammen's understanding of it as essentially history without guilt, sense of heritage that suffuses us with pride rather than with shame (688). Although nostalgia can function as sentimental balm salve wounds of more divisive historical conflict, we should use this definition press beyond out-of-hand neo-Marxist condemnation of nostalgia, as seems at best incomplete. Current theorists offer range of perspectives on nostalgia as both method of cultural retreat and critique. From Greek nostos, to return home, and algia, a sorrowful or distressing condition or illness, nostalgia is literally state of homesickness. (1) By twentieth century, concept had been gradually stripped of its medical associations and took on more pejorative meaning as the useless yearning for world or for way of life from which one has been irrevocably severed (Starobinski 101). Whereas there is undoubtedly good deal of truth involved in this typical definition, nostalgia is not univocal phenomenon, but contains multiple, even contradictory levels. Svetlana Boym proposes two contrasting impulses of nostalgic desire: restorative versus reflective nostalgia. In its uncritical restorative sense, nostalgia can become an abdication of personal responsibility, guilt-free homecoming, ethical and aesthetic failure (xiv). Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos and attempts transhistorical reconstruction of lost home (xviii), while reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, longing itself, and delays homecoming--wistfully, ironically, desperately. …

Istorik i vlast': istoricheskaia nauka v SSSR i kontseptsiia istorii feodal'noi Rossii v kontekste politiki i ideologii (1930-1950-e gg) by A. M. Dubrovskii (review)

REVIEWS 173 Unfortunately, Meerovich's failure to contextualize his intricate narratives in either thewider history or historiography of the period renders his two books of little interestor use to all but themost specialized of readers. This is an immense pity, as the author isnot shyof posing broad questions which are currently of central concern to historians ? the titles of the two books are evidence enough of this.A range of studies of early Soviet 'everyday life',by both Russian scholars such as Natal'ia Lebina, Katerina Gerasimova and II'ia Utekhin, and Western researchers such as Julia Obertreis, Svetlana Boym, Stephen Kotkin, Steven E. Harris, Monica R?thers, Susan Reid and many others, have engaged carefully and subtlywith the regime's strategy of trans forming consciousness through housing policy and practice, as well as with occupants' lived experience of domestic space. Studies of passportization, population policy, migration and settlement by David Shearer, Nathalie Moine, Gijs Kessler, Peter Holquist, Peter Gatrell and myself, among others, have explored the regime's impulse to 'sedentarize' its population. All these historians would agree with Meerovich's claim that Soviet housing policy was a function both of ideological precepts ? itsambition to create a new type of socialist citizen ? and of its political strategies of control, surveil lance and discipline. Meerovich's glib dismissal of other scholarship and his almost exclusive focus on published laws and decrees, however, mean that his work does little to deepen or extend this rudimentary and limited insight, giving us no new or better understanding of themultiplicity of interests which competed to translate their own priorities and preoccupations into policy, of the extent to which state-decreed housing policy was implemented or effective in creating new forms of everyday life,or of the character of popular negotiation or subversion of normative spatial structures. Not only do the two books fail to take account of or relate their findings to the existing literature, but they present their narratives in an untidy, unstructured and convoluted manner, making ithard to follow the sequence of complex, sometimes microscopic changes in the statutory and administra tive basis of policy. Granting that the objective of the Ibidem book series to specialize in 'narrowly focussed' and 'empirical' scholarship is in itselfvery valuable, the internal organization of these two slim editions makes it difficult even to use them as reference handbooks for the evolving legislative and administrative framework governing housing policy during the interwar period. School of History NickBaron Universityof Nottingham Dubrovskii, A. M. Istorik i vlast': istoricheskaia nauka v SSSR i kontseptsiiaistorii f?odal'noi Rossii v kontekste politiki i ideologii(igjo-igjo-e gg.). Izdatel'stvo Brianskogo gosudarstvennogo universit? ta im. akad. I. G. Petrovskogo, Briansk, 2005. 800 pp. Notes. Index. Price unknown. A. M. Dubrovskii, who in 1992 published a biography of the historian S.V. Bakhrushin (1882-1950), has in thisnew book expanded his scope to examine 174 SEER, 86, I, 2008 the historiography ofmedieval and early modern Russia in the Stalin era, placing it in the context of the development of Bolshevik ideology and the relationship between the Soviet authorities and the historical profession. The broad outlines of thisprocess are of course well known, but Dubrovskii adds valuable new detail, much of itdrawn from archival sources, and provides a more nuanced interpretation than many of his predecessors. In common with others who have written on this theme (most recently, theAmerican historian David Brandenberger), the author identifies a gradual ideological shift in the course of the 1930s away from proletarian internationalism towards Soviet patriotism, Russian nationalism and great-power statism. But Dubrovskii argues that, alongside this new trend, elements of the earlier revolutionary class-based approach persisted. The balance between the two strands changed in response to changing external circumstances: the patriotic line was of course strongest in the early years of the Second World War, but Soviet Marxism began to reassert itselffrom 1943,when themilitary tide turned in favour of the Soviet Union. In contrast tomany critics of Stalinist historiography, the author sees some positive features in this revival of Soviet Marxist ideology ? in particular, the fact that its emphasis on thematerial base and on the class-struggle inspired a new agenda for historians...

The Future of Nostalgia

Book Review| January 01 2008 The Future of Nostalgia Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 404 pp. Lawrence Jones Lawrence Jones Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2008) 14 (1): 164. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2007-050 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lawrence Jones; The Future of Nostalgia. Common Knowledge 1 January 2008; 14 (1): 164. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2007-050 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsCommon Knowledge Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2008 by Duke University Press2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

“Banality of Evil,” Mimicry, and the Soviet Subject: Varlam Shalamov and Hannah Arendt

In this article, Svetlana Boym proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the everyday practices in the gulag at the crossroads of literature, political theory, and history. Boym places Soviet accounts of the gulag in the comparative context of the twentieth-century reflection on totalitarianism and terror by drawing on Hannah Arendt's theory of the banality of evil, judgment, and imagination. There is something inassimilable in Varlam Shalamov's prose: it confronts the experience of extremity but does not offer redemption. It resorts to the mimicry of Soviet discourse and the technologies of the gulag, but only to challenge any coherent conception of Soviet subjectivity, either enthusiastic or defiant. Boym examines Shalamov's uses of clichés, attention to intonation, blemish, mimicry, and estrangement. Instead of performing ideology, Shalamov's Kolyma Tales expose the breaking points of Russian and Soviet cultural myths, giving new insight into reading historical documents and understanding gulag memory in post-Soviet Russia.

Mıgırdiç Margosyan and Mehmed Uzun: Remembering cultural Pluralism in Diyarbakır

AbstractLiterary narratives offer their audience opportunities to surpass existing monolithic social and cultural identities through reflecting on and representing the past from new perspectives. This article aims to elaborate this argument by a discussion of multi-ethnicity, multiculturalism, reflective nostalgia, and cultural intimacy in the portrayals of Diyarbakir's “Infidel Quarter” in two literary works: Mıgırdiç Margosyan's Gavur Mahallesi and Mehmed Uzun's Nar Çiçekleri. Both works, the former as a short story collection and the latter as a collection of essays, share autobiographical features and reflect the multiculturalism of Diyarbakır in the 1940s and 1950s from the point of view of an Armenian and a Kurd with similar sensitivities. Margosyan and Uzun's works indicate a cultural pluralism in Diyarbakır where different religious cultures used to exist side by side. The intermingling of languages in this neighborhood shows a kind of “inclusive multiculturalism.” Svetlana Boym's differentiation and discussion of two kinds of nostalgia as restorative and reflective, the former as nationalist and the latter as individual or collective memory oriented, help us to evaluate Margosyan and Uzun's works as alternatives to nationalist narratives. Both of these works, dealing with reflective nostalgia through the depiction of cultural intimacy between ethnic groups, provide their audience with possibilities for the future.

Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel by John J. Su

MLR, I02.4, 2007 I I 5 I of leaving itbehind, though at themoment that sounds a pious hope inmuch of theworld rather than a believable reality.Stout wishes to enlarge the concept ofwar poetry, so that itextends beyond thenarrow category of 'trenchpoets', who wrote out of their front-line experience, or the poets inuniform who wrote about war without seeing any direct action. Stout extends it to take in any poets who responded towar and expressed loss and grief, and she has chapters on thewomen poets of the two world wars (some ofwhom came close to the action as nurses or ambulance drivers). Stout is on familiar ground in her discussion of Sassoon and Owen, who changed the concept ofwar poetry. But likemany other commentators she assumes that their reaction against thewar was more representative of opinion at large, inor out of the armed forces, than itwas. The most substantial poetic memorial to theGreat War by a British writer, David Jones's In Parenthesis, gets only a fleetingmention in the notes. Reasonably enough, Stout's frame of reference isAmerican, and after the dis cussion of theFirstWorld War British poets tend tomake just the occasional guest appearance. Nevertheless, inher account of the run-up to theSecond World War she includes a long and admiring account ofLouis MacNeice's evocation of the eve ofwar, AutumnyJournal,which she rightlyregards as a little-knownmasterwork. When she comes to thewar itselfStout concentrates on American poets, in readings ofRandall Jarrell,Louis Simpson, and other soldier poets, and, on the civilian sidelines,Wallace Stevens. The only British poet inuniform she discusses isGavin Ewart, an attractive but minor talent in comparison with thosewho are ignored, such as Keith Douglas, Roy Fuller, Alun Lewis, and Hamish Henderson. She does, though, provide a good analysis of 'LittleGidding' as a poem ofwartime experience. Stout is ultimately concerned with cultural history, and her reading of poetry is supported by studies of thevisual arts and music thatcame out of thewars; Britten's War Requiem is a famous example of the latter, though her range iswide enough to include a lively (and to this reviewer evocative) discussion of the popular songs of World War II. She shows how theUnited States went to great lengths to instil a patriotic mythology into a population forwhom thewar was remote and incompre hensible. The British, whose cities were being bombed and had Nazi Europe twenty miles from theircoast, had a greater sense ofwhat it was all about. This isan enjoyable and informativebook, even if it lacks an overall sense of direction. UNIVERSITY OFWARWICK BERNARDBERGONZI Ethics and Nostalgia in theContemporary Novel. By JOHNJ.SU. Cambridge: Cam bridgeUniversityPress. 2005. vii+226pp. C45. ISBN 978-o-52i-85440-5. On revisiting St Lucia, thepoet narrator inDerek Walcott's Omeros (London: Faber & Faber, i99i) reflects, 'Art isHistory's nostalgia, itprefers a thatched Iroof to a concrete factory,and the huge church Iabove a bleached village' (p. 228). John Su cites The Odyssey as the foundational text regarding a yearning fororigins, for the home leftbehind, and notes itsappeal tomany twentieth-centurywriters, including Joyce andWalcott, but rejects the criticism implicit in Walcott's lines.His book sets out to question what he sees as the fashionable valuing ofmemory over and against nostalgia, wherein "'[m]emory" signifies intimate personal experience, which often counters institutional histories; "nostalgia" signifies inauthentic or commodified ex periences inculcated by capitalist or nationalist interests' (p. 2). Su eschews a long tradition which has valued nostalgia as central toworks by esteemed European and American literary authors, including Rousseau, Proust, Thoreau, Eliot, andMarquez. Indeed, his discussion is mainly informedbymore con temporarywriting and critical discussion, and the literarytextshe studies all date from I 152 Reviews after World War II. In opposition to thosewho deplore thekind ofnostalgia embodied in theheritage industry,or perhaps in the idyllic childhood memories celebrated by negritude poets like Senghor, he cites Svetlana Boym's recent The Future ofNostal gia, which explores theways inwhich nostalgia can be either restorative or reflective, shaping a certainway of thinkingabout a particular time and place, and granting such memories a transformative and reconstructive power. But whereas Boym focuses on artists exiled fromRussia and Eastern Europe (including Nabakov, Brodsky, Stravin sky,and Benjamin), Su takes a...

A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry by Susan M. Schultz

I 152 Reviews after World War II. In opposition to thosewho deplore thekind ofnostalgia embodied in theheritage industry,or perhaps in the idyllic childhood memories celebrated by negritude poets like Senghor, he cites Svetlana Boym's recent The Future ofNostal gia, which explores theways inwhich nostalgia can be either restorative or reflective, shaping a certainway of thinkingabout a particular time and place, and granting such memories a transformative and reconstructive power. But whereas Boym focuses on artists exiled fromRussia and Eastern Europe (including Nabakov, Brodsky, Stravin sky,and Benjamin), Su takes a broad range ofCaribbean, African American, Native American, Nigerian, and British writers. Through detailed analysis of textsby Toni Morrison, JeanRhys, V. S. Naipaul, Kazuo Ishiguro, IanMcEwan, Chinua Achebe, N. Scott Momaday, JoanRiley, Leslie Marmon Silko,Wole Soyinka, Paule Marshall, and Evelyn Waugh, Su argues for theconstructive role ofnostalgia fora lostor distant homeland in establishing ethical ideals in a fragmented and dispersed society. Rejecting what he sees as an ethics centred on individualism, Su chooses amodel based on the philosophy of Levinas and his emphasis on the interactive encounters between individuals and responsibility for the 'other',while recognizing the 'other's' difference. This model works particularly well in the analysis ofMorrison, Native American, Caribbean, and Nigerian writers, but seems less appropriate to the com parison of Waugh and Ishiguro in thechapter on theBritish 'estatenovel' (which also refers to Mansefield Park and Howard's End). Su could have discussed more fully the differences between thesewriters and one might have expected him also to link this discussion to the analysis ofNaipaul's Enigma ofArrival in an earlier chapter. One difficulty in reading thisbook is itsshiftingdefinitions of 'nostalgia'. It begins by establishing place as the key point of reference, arguing persuasively for the sig nificance of 'theClearing' (as a place forcommunal gatherings and gradual healing), inMorrison's Beloved. But in the final chapter it is not place but an imagined ideal community which becomes the focus of nostalgia, Abazon inAchebe's Anthills of the Savannah and Aiyero in Soyinka's Season ofAnomy. Nevertheless, both the general argument linking specific kinds ofnostalgia with theethics ofLevinas and thedetailed analysis of thiswide range of texts are suggestive and often illuminating. UNIVERSITY OFKENT, CANTERBURY LYN INNES A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry. By SUSANM. SCHULTZ. Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press. 2005. Viii + 247 pp. ?28.50. ISBN 978-o-8I73-5i98-4. It isno easy task to survey contemporary poetry, ofwhich there are countless practi tioners and schools. It is also a question of criticalmethod, ofwhat language we shall use in speaking of the texts of our choice. The Italian Eugenio Montale once wrote thatpoetry is in theclutches of those thatare less fittounderstand it, meaning profes sional critics.On theother hand, who but a professional critic reads 'advanced' poetry? Susan M. Schultz's A Poetics of Impasse is a good example of the ongoing debate on poetry, ofwhich it isdifficult tograsp thebeginning and the conclusion. A professor at theUniversity ofHawai'i and a poet herself, she devotes the introduction (written inverse) and Chapter 7 ('Hawai'i's Pidgin Literature, Performance, and Postcolonial ity') to the relation of poetry and academic politics, e.g. to the rightof local 'pidgin' poets tobe accepted within the 'canon'. Some of this,given thegravity of the discus sion, borders on involuntary parody, and could well be quoted in a fictional satire on academics: 'I do not want to suggest that silence, a focal point in this conversation With myself (a silent one, except for the tapping of thekeys) is a univocal I(as it were) term, for silence needs to be stripped away from silencing [... .]' (p. 21). Impasse, the MLR, I02.4, 2007 II53 titularsubject, has a notable history in twentieth-century literature,fromSam Beckett toHenry Roth. Schultz follows itspresence perceptively in some figuresofmajor, or disputed, standing: the little-known last poems ofHart Crane, thatattempt to break away from his emphatic earlier lyricism (Chapter i), 'Laura Riding's Essentialism' (Chapter 2), the disregarded poems ofGertrude Stein (Chapter 3), and 'JohnAsh bery's Critique ofHarold Bloom' (Chapter 4). Some of thecomments here are astute, and Schultz moves into territories that to some extent are of her own making. There isno...

Notes Toward a Theory of Nostalgia: Childhood and the Evocation of the Past in Two European "Heritage" Films

This essay centers on the moral and socio-political dimensions of the European colonial experience as represented in its historical aspect in two so-called "heritage" films, Claire Denis' Chocolat (France, 1988) and Caroline Link's Nowhere in Africa (Germany, 2002). The real weight of this argument, however, falls on the specification of nostalgia, on accounting for its conceptual history and diagnosing its somatic effects in these works and elsewhere in literature, history, philosophy, and film. Contra Emmanuel Kant, Linda Hutcheon, Svetlana Boym, and others, nostalgia is here understood as comprised of a unique combination of utopianism, "temporal ambivalence," and conduciveness to translation. The operation and interaction of these constitutive properties is then explored alongside a nuanced reading of the beliefs, desires, and actions of France and Regina, the two girl protagonists at the narrative and moral-philosophical centers of, respectively, Denis's and Link's films.

Postmodernism and the Place of Nostalgia in Ingeborg Bachmann's Franza Fragment

The concept of nostalgia is currently everywhere in academic and popular discourse. With its Greek root words nostos (to return home) and algos (pain or sorrow) (Hutcheon 193), the term conjures the pain associated with the loss of nation, home, and childhood.1 A product of migration, nostalgia is difficult to define, and those who write about it almost invariably point to the elusiveness of the concept. Since Fredric Jameson's seminal work Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) it has become possible to conceive of nostalgia as a necessary byproduct of the postmodern. Generally considered to be a regressive or even reactionary tendency that would represent an anachronistic residue in the fabric of postmodern texts, it can also be seen as a necessary outgrowth of the lack of historicity that characterizes postmodernity In the German-language context, the concept of nostalgia is in need of further analysis, since the unique fixation with history in post-war Germany and Austria is reflected in an aesthetics often characterized by the coupling of postmodern style with historical critique. In this essay, I explore the concept of nostalgia as simultaneously affective, regressive, and ironic in Ingeborg Bachmann's Franza fragment (19651966). This novel reflects the author's experimentation with postmodern style such as intertextuality and overcoded citations,2 yet it simultaneously engages in a vigorous critique of the residues of fascism in the post-war Austrian Heimat via the representation of gender and family relations of power and oppression. Politically abhorrent due to the mantra of never again in German and Austrian public discourse, the linkage between nostalgia and nation is disallowed in these countries. The longing for a past time and home always points to the period before 1933, and this sort of longing is akin to forgetting, to the erasure of the suffering endured in the Holocaust and the national guilt for having caused this suffering. In this sense, unreflected nostalgia is forgetting. Perhaps the only officially sanctioned form of nostalgia in Germany is Ostalgie, the longing for the unspoiled state of East Germany with its socialist resistance to fascism and charming consumer products such as the Trabant car.3 In Austria, nostalgia for the mythologized Habsburg Empire is sometimes seen in light of a Utopian vision of multicultural harmony, but even this form of nostalgia is viewed with a level of skepticism. Critics such as Linda Hutcheon and Svetlana Boym have recently reconceptualized the role of nostalgia in postmodernism so that irony, and affect no longer remain at odds with one another. Hutcheon provides a place for reflection within the postmodern that does not deny affect. In distinguishing between revivalist and postmodern architecture, she makes the following observation: The postmodern architecture does indeed recall the past, but always with the kind of ironic double vision that acknowledges the final impossibility of indulging in even as it consciously evokes nostalgia's affective power. In the postmodern, in other words, (and here is the source of the tension) nostalgia itself gets both called up, exploited, and ironized. This is a complicated (and postmodernly paradoxical) move that is both an ironizing of nostalgia itself, of the very urge to look backward for authenticity, and, at the same moment, a sometimes shameless invoking of the visceral power that attends the fulfillment of that urge. (205, emphasis in original) The play of postmodern cognition allows, according to Hutcheon, for irony and affect, two modes generally considered to be incompatible with postmodernism (Jameson, Postmodernism 11). This sense of nostalgia recalls Boym's notion of reflective nostalgia, a form of longing that thrives inalgia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming-wistfully, ironically, desperately (xviii). If nostalgia is to have a place in the German postmodern, then it is in the sense described by Hutcheon, as an affect that nevertheless retains its ironic distance. …

YUGONOSTALGIA: RESTORATIVE AND REFLECTIVE NOSTALGIA IN FORMER YUGOSLAVIA

Drawing on Svetlana Boym's distinction between "restorative" and "reflective" nostalgia, the essay maps two broad, and often overlapping, ideal types of Yugonostalgia expressed in and through contemporary former Yugoslav film, popular music, and multi-media. The first expresses reeonstructive longing for an essential Yugoslav past; the second offers self-consciously ambivalent and critical frames in indulging fantasies of this past. What different forms of Yugonostalgia share in common is challenging symbolic geographies of disunity that have dominated political discourse in former Yugoslavia for the last two decades. The two types can be differenciated by their stance toward the presentpast and the future: while both of them are based on fantasies of the past, thc "restorative" Yugonostalgic looks backward towards a seemingly fixed time and space while "reflective" nostalgic restlessly grapples with the dislocation so palpable in the former Yugoslavia to imagine alternative futures.

YUGONOSTALGIA: RESTORATIVE AND REFLECTIVE NOSTALGIA IN FORMER YUGOSLAVIA

Abstract: Drawing on Svetlana Boym's distinction between "restorative" and "reflective" nostalgia, the essay maps two broad, and often overlapping, ideal types of Yugonostalgia expressed in and through contemporary former Yugoslav film, popular music, and multi-media. The first expresses reconstructive longing for an essential Yugoslav past; the second offers self-consciously ambivalent and critical frames in indulging fantasies of this past. What different forms of Yugonostalgia share in common is challenging symbolic geographies of disunity that have dominated political discourse in former Yugoslavia for the last two decades. The two types can be differentiated by their stance toward the presentpast and the future: while both of them are based on fantasies of the past, the "restorative" Yugonostalgic looks backward towards a seemingly fixed time and space while "reflective" nostalgic restlessly grapples with the dislocation so palpable in the former Yugoslavia to imagine alternative futures.

Ad vieku ŭ viek: Biełaruskaja paezija / Iz veka v vek. Belorusskaia poeziia by A. K. Kozhedub L. N. Turbina (review)

REVIEWS 731 possessed his own means of access to French modernism. Later he would single out Proust, not Gide, as one of the four greatest mastersof twentiethcenturyprose . My opening comments on this book's affinitieswith Western scholarship should not obscureitsfruitfulconnections with severalgenerationsof Russian literary and cultural study, ranging from the classic systems outlook of Tynianov, Lotman, and Uspenskii to recent work on the fusion of life and literature by Svetlana Boym, Gregory Freidin, and Irina Paperno. With its archival thoroughness, critical insights, cross-culturalrange, and theoretical incisiveness, How It WasDonein Parisoffers a richly detailed, provocative overview of a poorly known but illuminating confluence of emigre Russian and Frenchliterarytendencies. Department ofEnglish JOHN BURT FOSTER, JR. George MasonUniversity, VA Kozhedub, A. K. and Turbina, L. N. (comps). Ad viekuu viek.Bielaruskaja paezija/ Iz vekav vek.Belorusskaia poeziia.Slavianskaiapoeziia XX-XXI. Pranat,Moscow, 2003. 704 pp. Index. Priceunknown. LITERATURE written in 'minor'languages needs to be translatedif it is to find a wider audience, and in this respect Belarusian literature is no exception. Although one or two prose writers,notably the late VasilBykaui(1924-2003), have attained internationalfame, Belarusianpoetry still lacks the reputation that its variety, innovativeness and high technical standardswarrant. Thus, this bilingual anthology deserves to be welcomed for helping to remedy the situation,even though its audience will inevitablybe mainlyrussophone. A century ago the poet A1esHarun (I887-I920) remarkedof Belarusthat 'thepeople themselvesarea bard'and, indeed, the flourishingof poetryin this unhappy land has been a notable feature of Slav literaturein the second half of the twentiethcentury.The anthologyof paralleltextsunderreviewincludes examples of the work of more than a hundred poets, put into Russian by a dozen translators,three of whom are the poets themselves, and at least one who is also a compiler, Liubov' Turbina (b. 1942) a considerable Russianlanguage poet in her own right. She is also the author of a thoughtful introduction, outlining the different generations within the anthology: from the 'philological poets' of the sixties who were encouraged and respected during the Thaw, often finding their way into editorships of journals and comparable posts, to the stagnant seventies when, nonetheless, several outstanding poets like Ales Razanaui (b. 1947) and Uladzimir Niaklajeul (b. I946) came to the fore, followed by the post-Chernobylgeneration of the eighties, outstanding amongst whom is Anatol Sys (b. 1959). This anthology presents a broad picture of varied and rich creative achievement. If the quantityof poets representedmight suggestto the uninitiatedthat the net has been cast too widely, it may be noted that, for the similarperiod, the recent, and now standard, monolingual anthology of Belarusianpoetry (M. Skobla ed., Krasa isi/a,Miensk, 2003) gives examplesof well over two hundredpoets. 732 SEER, 82, 3, 2004 It is a myth, often refuted by Bykau and others, that relatively close languages are easy to translateone into another. This undoubtedly appliesto the process of putting Belarusianinto Russian. The 'false friends'beloved of language text books are here a danger to be avoided in syntax and idiom, whilst particular problems are created for translatorsby the lexical inventiveness of severalof the best poets, includingRazanau and the doyen of them all, Ryhor Baradulin (b. I935). On the whole, however, the standard of translationhere is admirablyhigh. In the I96os Bykauitook to puttinghis own worksinto Russian to avoid Bowdlerizationat the translationstage, but those who do it in this anthology presumably have other reasons. They include a majorhistoricalnovelistwho has recentlytaken up poetry, Uladzimier Arloui (b. I953), and a talented poet and dissidentAleh Biembiel (b. 1939) who in 2000 abandoned the world for life as a monk. Biembiel is one of seventeen poets here not included in the Krasai sitaanthology, which may, perhaps, be takenas furtherconfirmationof Belarus'srichpoetic resources. This bilingualanthology isa timelyandworthwhileenterprise,well selected and edited, with a good overallstandardof translations.It may be hoped that, at the beginning of a new century, it will go some way towards putting Belarusianpoetry on the map. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies ARNOLD MCMILLIN University College London Stephan, Halina (ed.). Livingin Translation: PolishWriters inAmerica. Studies in Slavic Literatureand Poetics, 38. EditionsRodopi, Amsterdamand New York,2003. 382 pp. Notes. ?78.oo: $93.00 (paperback). HALINA STEPHAN has done a finejob of editing sixteen essays into a unified anthology on Polishexile writingin America, between...

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

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...

The Shaping of Soviet Workers' Leisure: Workers' Clubs and Palaces of Culture in the 1930s

In his recent ethnographic history of the Nivkhi of Sakhalin Island, Bruce Grant employs the “Soviet House of Culture” as a metaphor of cultural construction and the “hybrid identities produced by the Soviet state.”Bruce Grant, In the Soviet House of Culture (Princeton, 1995), xi. Yuri Slezkine's rendition of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as a communal apartment (kommunalka), where each national group had its own room but shared the kitchen, bathroom, and corridors, serves a similar metaphorical purpose, enabling the reader to envision the complexities of superstate–nationality interaction in more familiar spatial terms.Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53 (1994):414–52. For the USSR as a “superstate,” see Moshe Lewin, Russia/USSR/Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate (New York, 1995). Both the communal apartment and the house, or palace, of culture were venerable Soviet institutions. Each was the product of the reimagining of sociability in the wake of the October Revolution, representing different types of imagined communities that only subsequently assumed material reality. The communal apartment has been the subject of novels (both utopian and dystopian), film, song, painting, economic and cultural history, and several (absurdist) exhibits.For the treatment of the communal apartment as “the cornerstone of the now disappearing Soviet civilization,” see Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 121–67, quotation on 123. See also Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1989), 200–4, 213–19; and Albrecht Martiny, Bauen und Wohnen in der Sowjetunion nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin, 1983), 20–24, 138–58. The avant-gardist artist Ilya Kabakov has made the kommunalka the subject of paintings and exhibits. See Blair A. Ruble, “From Khrushcheby to Korobki,” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, ed. William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble (Cambridge, UK, 1993), 232–33; and Dina Vierny et al., Fondation Dina Vierny-Musee Maillol (Paris, 1995), 128–29. By contrast, little attention has been given to palaces of culture or to the less grandiloquently titled workers' clubs.Western scholarship on workers' clubs and palaces of culture has been limited to the formative decade of Soviet power and the post-Stalin decades. In addition to articles by John Hatch cited below, see Gabriele Gorzka, “Proletarian Culture in Practice: Workers' Clubs, 1917–1921,” in Essays on Revolutionary Culture and Stalinism, ed. John W. Strong (Columbus, OH, 1990), 29–55; and Anne White, De-Stalinization and the House of Culture: Declining State Control over Leisure in the USSR, Poland and Hungary, 1953–89 (London, 1990).