Modernity, Domesticity and Temporality in Russia - by Rebecca Friedman (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Revolution, war, dislocation, famine, and rivers of blood: these traumas dominated everyday life at turn-of-the-century Russia. As Modernity, Domesticity and Temporality in Russia explains, amidst such public turmoil Russians turned inwards, embracing and carefully curating the home in an effort to express both personal and national identities.

From the nostalgic landed estate with its backward gaze to the present-focused and efficient urban apartment to the utopian communal dreams of a Soviet future, the idea of time was deeply embedded in Russian domestic life. Rebecca Friedman is the first to weave together these twin concepts of time and space in relation to Russian culture and, in doing so, this book reveals how the revolutionary domestic experiments reflected a desire by the state and by individuals to control the rapidly changing landscape of modern Russia.

Drawing on extensive popular and literary sources, both visual and textual, this fascinating book enables readers to understand the reshaping of Russian space and time as part of a larger revolutionary drive to eradicate, however ambivalently, the 19th-century gentrified sloth in favour of the proficient Soviet comrade.

Review Quotes

Crossing the 1917 divide, this book focuses in an entirely innovative way on how in early 20th Century Russia notions of revolutionary domesticity were intrinsically interwoven with new notions of historical time. Friedman demonstrates how during a time of immense transformation nostalgia and modern, utopian visions simultaneously co-existed and fed one another.
Laurie Manchester, Associate Professor of History, Arizona State University, USA

In Modernity, Domesticity and Temporality in Russia: Time at Home, Rebecca Friedman's deep commitment to gender history is blended with her fresh approach to debates about modernity and temporality. Reading pre- and post-revolutionary Russian and Soviet periodicals and advice literature focused on the domestic realm, Friedman makes an insightful contribution to social histories of the home, and time, in Russia's tumultuous early twentieth century.
Dan Healey, Professor of Modern Russian History, University of Oxford, UK

About the Author

Rebecca Friedman is Associate Professor of Russian and Soviet History at Florida International University, USA. She is the author of Masculinity, Autocracy and the Russian University, 1804-1863 (2006), and editor of Russian Masculinities (2002, co-edited with Barbara Clements and Dan Healey) and European Identity and Culture: Narratives of Transnational Belonging (2012, co-edited with Markus Thiel).