Soviet Materialities - by Mollie Arbuthnot & Christianna Bonin & Gabriella Ferrari (Hardcover)

About the Book

Soviet materialities rethinks Soviet history and culture through the lens of materiality, exploring how humans and objects co-shaped identity, ideology, and social life. This interdisciplinary volume bridges Soviet-era thought with theoretical insights from New Materialism, offering a groundbreaking approach to the study of the Soviet past.

Book Synopsis

Soviet materialities explores how material transforms our understanding of Soviet culture, from the textures of domestic space in 1960s apartment blocks to Gulag labour on the Moscow canal, and from avant-garde literary theory in the 1920s to conceptual art under perestroika. It starts from the ethos that the material world shapes people and society. Taking a material approach--or a range of material approaches--can therefore illuminate aspects of the cultural production and lived experiences of Soviet socialism that are not reflected in other kinds of historical records. This edited volume brings cutting-edge research by emerging scholars together with the established voices who have broken the ground in this sub-field over the last twenty years and promises to make a major intervention in the study of Soviet history and culture.

From the Back Cover

How did matter matter in the Soviet world? Soviet materialities rethinks the relationship between humans, things, and environments in the Soviet Union, moving beyond a simple study of objects made in the USSR to explore how materials shaped social life, ideology, and identity. It calls for a fresh approach to materiality, one that recognises the mutual formation of people and their material surroundings under Soviet socialism.

Bringing together a selection of original and interdisciplinary scholarship, its case studies range from the Turksib railway built across the Kazakh steppe to a collection of pickled brains, from the literal and metaphorical explosions of gelatine printing to an atheist museum built in a Sufi shrine in Uzbekistan, and from heirloom jewellery sold for survival during famine in Ukraine to the experimental performances of Conceptualist artists.

Drawing on affect theory, environmental history, the history of the everyday--and the theoretical interventions of New Materialism more broadly--Soviet materialities uncovers how distinct ways of understanding and conceptualising matter emerged in the ideological and historical contexts of the Soviet Union. Bridging history, literature, anthropology, art history and environmental humanities, this book argues that materiality offers a groundbreaking methodological toolkit for rethinking the Soviet past through material relations.

About the Author

Mollie Arbuthnot is Assistant Professor of History at Nazarbayev University
Christianna Bonin is Assistant Professor of Art History and Theory at American University of Sharjah
Gabriella A. Ferrari is an independent scholar of Russian and Soviet visual culture