Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia

Svetlana Boym

Published by Harvard University Press 1995

Common Places

Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia

Svetlana Boym

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674028647

Overview
Contents

About this book

Boym provides a view of Russia that is historically informed, replete with unexpected detail, and stamped with authority. Alternating analysis with personal accounts of Russian life, she conveys the foreignness of Russia and examines its peculiar conceptions of private life and common good, of Culture and Trash, of sincerity and banality.

Reviews

Visitors and outsiders have long lamented that the real lives of Soviet citizens were hidden behind a veil of official rhetoric. The private self was kept separate from the public self as a sort of defensive or coping mechanism. Boym, who was raised in Leningrad but has lived in the West for 13 years, analyzes the dichotomy between the common meeting places of public life and the no-places of private life and discerns a cultural tradition that still persists. Her themes are the communal apartment (which deprived all residents of a private life), graphomania (the compulsion to bad writing), and the spiritual self in Russian philosophy. Examples are drawn from film, literature, painting, and philosophy of the 19th and, primarily, 20th centuries.
-- Marcia L. Sprules Library Journal

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Introduction: Theoretical Common Places Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Mythologies of Everyday Life Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	29
2. Living in Common Places: The Communal Apartment Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121
3. Writing Common Places: Graphomania Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	168
4. Postcommunism, Postmodernism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
Conclusion: Nostalgia for the Common Place Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	283
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	293
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	343

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 384

eBook

Published: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 9780674028647