Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, formerly socialist countries have gone through manifold transformations, whilst remnants of socialism remain ubiquitous. The volume explores various spaces of the postsocialist landscape, presenting a mixture of real and imaginary spaces, of memory and nostalgia, of aesthetic and political symbolism, of the global East and the global South, of academic and essayistic writing. It casts a glance at the heterogeneous relics of socialism and their transformation in very different parts of the world. From the description of (post-)socialist interiors, facades, neighborhoods, parks, monuments, and objects towards the imaginary spaces of literature, the contributors describe the concreteness and intimacy of some of the places that span across and even beyond of what is left of the "second world" today.

"Socialist Realism without Shores" offers an international perspective on the aesthetics of socialist realism--an aesthetic that, contrary to expectations, survived the death of its originators and the demise of its original domain. This expanded edition of a special issue of the "South Atlantic Quarterly" brings together scholars from various parts of the globe to discuss socialist realism as it appears across genres in art, architecture, film, and literature and across geographic divides--from the "center," Russia, to various points at the "periphery"--China, Germany, France, Poland, remote republics of the former USSR, and the United States.
The contributors here argue that socialist realism has never been a monolithic art form. Essays demonstrate, among other things, that its literature could accommodate psychoanalytic criticism; that its art and architecture could affect the aesthetic dictates of Moscow that made "Soviet" art paradoxically heterogeneous; and that its aesthetics could accommodate both high art and crafted kitsch. "Socialist Realism without Shores" also addresses the critical discourse provoked by socialist realism--Stalinist aesthetics, "anthropological" readings; ideology critique and censorship; and the sublimely ironic approaches adapted from "sots art," the Soviet version of postmodernism.
"Contributors," Antoine Baudin, Svetlana Boym, Greg Castillo, Katerina Clark, Evgeny Dobrenko, Boris Groys, Hans Gunther, Julia Hell, Leonid Heller, Mikhail Iampolski, Thomas Lahusen, Regine Robin, Yuri Slezkine, Lily Wiatrowski Phillips, Xudong Zhang, Sergei Zimovets

More than six years in the making, Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s is the result of a unique international collaborative investigation by Russian, French, and Swiss scholars into hundreds of private, unpublished diaries found in remote libraries, archives, and family holdings. Intimacy and Terror reveals for the first time the private lives of a broad cross section of Russians during the harshest years of Stalin's purge - not just the now-familiar stories of those who were deported or killed. The ten diaries reveal the day-to-day thoughts of ordinary citizens, some far removed from political turmoil, some closely enmeshed. Together they paint an extraordinarily broad portrait of Russian life in the thirties; their insights into the daily life of that time have astonished even the Russian historians who read the original manuscripts. The diarists range from the ambitious literary bureaucrat who moves forward by denouncing his colleagues to the young unlettered careerist learning the ways of Soviet success; from the wife of a government bureaucrat, who writes in a pure Stalinist prose, to the candid thoughts and uncertainties of a dissident; from a provincial sailor on a distant Arctic vessel to Moscow intellectuals who meet and recount their conversations with Anna Akhmatova. Some of the diarists are wholly oblivious to the terrors of Stalin's purges; others see the failures of the regime as clearly as those writing today. To set the diaries in context, the book begins with a "Chronicle of the Year 1937" - an extraordinary montage comprised of excerpts from the daily newspaper Izvestiya juxtaposed with corresponding entries from a collective farmer's diary - and alsoincludes a chronology of major events in the Soviet Union during the latter half of the decade. The diaries bring us the true-life counterparts of characters we remember from classic Russian literature. Intimacy and Terror provides an unprecedented, intimate view of daily life in Russia at the height of Stalinism.