Dynamising Things: Essays on Objects, Relations, and People

Serguei Alex. Oushakine

Using diverse historical and ethnographic materials, this collection explores the various relationships between people and things that were actively fostered during the seven decades of Soviet socialism. It demonstrates how things, not always fully socialist, energized social relations, shaped communities, cultivated new identities, objectified emerging attitudes, and provoked affective attachments. In particular, this collection pays close attention to what Viktor Shklovsky, the founder of Russian Formalism, called “long-term things”—palpable, non-fictitious objects that refuse to disappear, insisting instead on their active presence and enduring relevance.

Biographical Note

Serguei Oushakine is Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. His research deals with Soviet and post-Soviet cultures in Eurasia. His current projects include a study of early Soviet pedagogy of images, and the history of Russian Formalism.

Readership

This book will be particularly relevant to academic institutions, libraries, specialists, and postgraduate students interested in material culture, daily life, socialism, and the Soviet and post-Soviet history of Russia.

Preface: On the Importance of Non-Fictitious Things
Acknowledgments
List of Figures

Part 1 The Materiality of Being

1 The Flexible and the Pliant: Disturbed Organisms of Soviet Modernity
1 Being Outside
2 Shattering Heredity
3 Mentoring Heredity

2 Things to Watch: Labour and Ethnicity in Picturebooks for Soviet Children
1 Learning to See Labour
2 Tools and Garbs of Labour
3 Flowerbeds of Ethnicities
4 National Forms
5 Artificial Simplifications
6 Portraits of Things
7 Marching towards the Common?

3 The Formalist Thing (Theory) or Why Tolstoy’s Sofa Should Matter
1 A Colony of Psychologism
2 Feeling through Parody
3 Shklovsky’s Latour
4 Theatres of Life
5 Key Stones

Part 2 Thing-Systems

4 ‘Against the Cult of Things’: On Soviet Productivism, Storage Economy, and Commodities with No Destination
1 The Thing-System of Soviet Productivism
2 Soviet Trade: Commodity Mess and Its Value
3 The Soviet Mode of Life: The Baza and the Superstructure
4 People, Things, and Otovarki

5 Crimes of Substitution: Detection in Late Soviet Society
1 A Crime (Story) of Our Own
2 Reversing the Order
3 Criminal Analogies
4 Hypocrisy of a Chameleon

6 Houses That Never Fall: Post-Utopian Dreamscapes of Late Soviet Paper Architecture
1 Post-Utopian Dreamscapes
2 Feeling Time and Space Differently
3 Grounding Pluritopic Dreamscapes
4 Storytellers of Embeddedness
5 Houses That Never Fall

Part 3 Thingful Times

7 The Quantity of Style: Imaginary Consumption in the New Russia
1 Making Up the Subject
2 Introjecting Political Changes
3 Symbolising Excess
4 The Culture of Symbolic Shortage

8 Aesthetics without Law: Cinematic Bandits in Post-Soviet Space
1 The Brigands of Brigada
2 Private Space under Construction
3 Expropriating Professional Space

9 Totality Decomposed: Objectalising Late Socialism in Post-Soviet Biochronicles
1 A New Sobriety: Objectalism
2 Biochronicles: Filming Raw Life
3 Lately: Field Notes of the Era
4 The Soviet Upbringing Has No Use

Part 4 Long-Term Things

10 ‘We’re Nostalgic but We’re Not Crazy’: Retrofitting the Past in Russia
1 Placing (Art in) Products
2 The Past as Pastiche
3 Borrowed Language
4 Uniforms and Surcoats

11 Remembering in Public: On the Affective Management of History
1 Getting New Perceptions
2 Connective Tissues
3 Mnemonic Formations as Objects of Affection

12 Second-Hand Nostalgia: An Ethnography of Things That Refuse to Perish
1 Touching Machines and Smelly Memories
2 In the Aftermath of Nostalgia
3 Painting with Things
4 Real. Soviet. Moving.
5 A Dreamlike Wondering

Bibliography
Index