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Russia at Play - Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Hardcover)
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Russia at Play - Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Hardcover)
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An athlete becomes a movie star; a waiter rises to manage a chain
of nightclubs; a movie scenarist takes to writing restaurant
reviews. Intrepid women hunt bears, drive in automobile races, and
fly, first in balloons and then in airplanes. Sensational crimes
jump from city streets onto the screen almost before the pistols
have had a chance to cool. Paris in the Twenties? Fitzgerald's New
York? Early Hollywood? No, tsarist Russia in the last decades
before the Revolution. In Russia at Play, Louise McReynolds
recreates a vibrant, rapidly changing culture in rich detail. Her
account encompasses the "legitimate" stage, vaudeville, nightclubs,
restaurants, sports, tourism, and the silent movie industry.
McReynolds reveals a pluralist and dynamic society, and shows how
the new icons of mass culture affected the subsequent gendering of
identities. The rapid industrialization and urbanization of the
late tsarist period spawned dramatic social changes-an urban middle
class and a voracious consumer culture demanded new forms of
entertainment. The result was the rapid incursion of commercial
values into the arts and the athletic field and unprecedented
degrees of social interaction in the new nightclubs, vaudeville
houses, and cheap movie houses. Traditional rules of social conduct
shifted to greater self-fulfillment and self-expression, values
associated with the individualism and consumerism of liberal
capitalism. Leisure-time activities, McReynolds finds, allowed
Russians who partook of them to recreate themselves, to develop a
modern identity that allowed for different senses of the self
depending on the circumstances. The society that spawned these
impulses would disappear in Russia for decades under the combined
blows of revolution, civil war, and collectivization, but questions
of personal identity are again high on the agenda as Russia makes
the transition from a collectivist society to one in which the
dominant ethos remains undefined.
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