This wide-ranging cultural history explores the expression of
Bolshevik Party ideology through the lens of landscape, or, more
broadly, space. Portrayed in visual images and words, the landscape
played a vital role in expressing and promoting ideology in the
former Soviet Union during the Stalin years, especially in the
1930s. At the time, the iconoclasm of the immediate
postrevolutionary years had given way to nation building and a
conscious attempt to create a new Soviet "culture." In painting,
architecture, literature, cinema, and song, images of landscape
were enlisted to help mold the masses into joyful, hardworking
citizens of a state with a radiant, utopian future -- all under the
fatherly guidance of Joseph Stalin. From backgrounds in history,
art history, literary studies, and philosophy, the contributors
show how Soviet space was sanctified, coded, and "sold" as an
ideological product. They explore the ways in which producers of
various art forms used space to express what Katerina Clark calls
"a cartography of power" -- an organization of the entire country
into "a hierarchy of spheres of relative sacredness," with Moscow
at the center. The theme of center versus periphery figures
prominently in many of the essays, and the periphery is shown often
to be paradoxically central. Examining representations of space in
objects as diverse as postage stamps, a hikers' magazine,
advertisements, and the Soviet musical, the authors show how
cultural producers attempted to naturalize ideological space, to
make it an unquestioned part of the worldview. Whether focusing on
the new or the centuries-old, whether exploring a built cityscape,
a film documentary, or the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the
Kremlin, the authors offer a consistently fascinating journey
through the landscape of the Soviet ideological imagination. Not
all features of Soviet space were entirely novel, and several of
the essayists assert continuities with the prerevolutionary past.
One example is the importance of the mother image in mass songs of
the Stalin period; another is the "boundless longing" inspired in
the Russian character by the burden of living amid vast empty
spaces. But whether focusing on the new or the centuries-old,
whether exploring a built cityscape, a film documentary, or the
painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, the authors offer a
consistently fascinating journey through the landscape of the
Soviet ideological imagination.
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