Arja Rosenholm

Naisia Venäjän kulttuurihistoriassa

Jane Costlow

Bringing together a team of scholars from the diverse fields of geography, literary studies, and history, this is the first volume to study water as a cultural phenomenon within the Russian/Soviet context. Water in this context is both a cognitive and cultural construct and a geographical and physical phenomenon, representing particular rivers (the Volga, the Chusovaia in the Urals, the Neva) and bodies of water (from Baikal to sacred springs and the flowing water of nineteenth-century estates), but also powerful systems of meaning from traditional cultures and those forged in the radical restructuring undertaken in the 1930s. Individual chapters explore the polyvalence and contestation of meanings, dimensions, and values given to water in various times and spaces in Russian history. The reservoir of symbolic association is tapped by poets and film-makers but also by policy-makers, the popular press, and advertisers seeking to incite reaction or drive sales. The volume's emphasis on the cultural dimensions of water will link material that is often widely disparate in time and space; it will also serve as the methodological framework for the analysis undertaken both within chapters and in the editors' introduction.

Meanings and Values of Water in Russian Culture

Marianne Liljeström

Irina Savkina

How do Russian women represent themselves in life-writing and life stories? Are there any general models of selves? Can autobiography be a genre for women? These and other related questions are discussed in this book featuring contributions from scholars in both East and West. The authors discuss images of female subjectivity in Russian women's autobiographical texts from the early 19th century until the present. The contributors analyse the diverse models of self that Russian women have constructed in diaries, memoirs, correspondence, autobiographical portraits, and self-writing through fiction and poetry.

Russian Women's Autobiographical Texts

Models of Self

Markku Lehtimäki

Elena Trubina

Nina Tynkkynen

This book addresses the Arctic and the northern regions by exploring cold waters and northern seascapes. It focuses on cultural discourses and artistic representations concerning the human experience and imagination of how the Arctic Ocean has been explored and used. It aims to assess what is specific to the northern waters vis-à-vis other sea and water areas in the world. The contextual background is provided by the fundamental shift from terra-based thinking towards aqua-based thinking, including the histories of the northern waters and the innovative ocean studies of the last decades. This book will be of interest to readers in Arctic studies and Sea and Ocean studies (including those with interests in literature, history, cultural and film studies, anthropology and politics), Environmental History and Cultural studies as well as in Russian studies. The book has been assembled with a view towards upper-level undergraduate and post-graduate students and scholars and will also be appropriate for courses in the fields mentioned above. The book will be of interest to specialists working in and with Arctic environmental issues. There is a broad array of international academic networks, environmental, governance and cultural associations outside academia whose members may also find the book of interest.

Tangible and Symbolic Seascapes of the North

Cold Waters

Kaarle Nordenstreng

This book provides a multi-faceted picture of the many complex processes taking place in the field of contemporary Russian media and popular culture. Russian social and cultural life today is strongly individualised and consumers are offered innumerable alternatives; but at the same time options are limited by the new technologies of control which are a key feature of Russian capitalism. Based on extensive original research by scholars in both Russia itself and in Finland, the book discusses new developments in the media industry and assesses a wide range of social and cultural changes, many of which are related to, and to an extent generated by, the media. The book argues that the Russian mass media industry, whilst facing the challenges of globalization, serves several purposes including making a profit, reinforcing patriotic discourse and popularizing liberalized lifestyles. Topics include changing social identities, new lifestyles, ideas of "glamour" and "professional values". Overall, the book demonstrates that the media in Russia is far from homogenous, and that, as in the West, despite new technologies of control, media audiences are being offered a new kind of pluralism which is profoundly influencing Russia's cultural, social and political landscape.

Russian Mass Media and Changing Values

Vlad Strukov

Privileging the visual as the main method of communication and meaning-making, this book responds critically to the worldwide discussion about the Arctic and the North, addressing the interrelated issues of climate change, ethics and geopolitics. A multi-disciplinary, multi-modal exploration of the Arctic, it supplies an original conceptualization of the Arctic as a visual world encompassing an array of representations, imaginings, and constructions. By examining a broad range of visual forms, media and forms such as art, film, graphic novels, maps, media, and photography, the book advances current debates about visual culture. The book enriches contemporary theories of the visual taking the Arctic as a spatial entity and also as a mode of exploring contemporary and historical visual practices, including imaginary constructions of the North. Original contributions include case studies from all the countries along the Arctic shore, with Russian material occupying a large section due to the country’s impact on the region

Imagining Shimmering Worlds in Culture, Literature and Politics

Visual Representations of the Arctic

Who is the hero-subject, who the object to be awakened? What ordeals must the hero suffer to become a New Man? Will the New Women awake and speak? What is woman's symbolic place? How is it constructed? What happens to the sexual difference in the evolutionary Utopia of the 'new' dawn with woman as a rational subject? How do women define the 'new' femininity? These are questions, that Gendering awakening deals with. The great modernization process in Russia in the 1860s is recast by the work through the discourse of gender.

Arja Rosenholm

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