Energy Culture: Work, Power, and Waste in Russia and the Soviet Union

Description

This volume investigates energy as a shaping force in Russian and Soviet literature, visual culture, and social practice. Chronologically arranged chapters explain how nineteenth-century ideas about energy informed realist novels and paintings; how the poetics of energy defined pre-Revolutionary and Stalinist utopianism; and how fossil fuels, electricity, and nuclear fission generated distinct aesthetic features in Imperial Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet literature, cinema, and landscape. The volume’s concentration on Russia responds to a clear need to understand the role the country plays in social, political, and economic processes endangering life on Earth today. The cultural dimension of Russia’s efforts at energy dominance deserves increased scholarly attention not only in its own right, but also because it directly affects global energy policy. As the contributors to this volume argue, the nationally inflected cultural myths that underlie human engagements with energy have been highly consequential in the Anthropocene. Acknowledgements Contents Notes on Contributors List of Figures Chapter 1: Introduction: Energy Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union Chapter 2: The Energy of Chernyshevsky’s Vera Pavlovna in the Modern Cultural Economy Cultural Signposts of Popular Science The Scientistic Framework of What Is to Be Done? The Neuroelectricity of Progress Cultural Economy and Women’s Prose What Is to Be Done? and (Print)-Capitalism Chapter 3: The Energy Trap: Anna Karenina as a Parable for the Twenty-First Century Thermodynamics as Cultural Context Narrative Energy Narrative Entropy Conclusion Chapter 4: Picturing Coal in the Donbas: Nikolai Kasatkin and the Energy of Late Realism Life Underground Artificial Light, Natural Dark Paint It Black Chapter 5: Polar Fantasies: Valery Bryusov and the Russian Symbolist Electric Aesthetic The Electric Sublime: The Symbolic Power of Electric Light The Russian Electric Aesthetic: From Utopianism to Symbolism Lyric Electricity in Bryusov’s Urban Poetry Polar Fantasies and Electric Science Fiction Chapter 6: Energetic Liquids in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Utopianism Introduction The Biocentric Labor Discipline of Fedorov’s “Common Task” Russian Cosmism in the Works of Maxim Gorky and Alexander Bogdanov Conclusion Chapter 7: Revolutionary Burnout and the Rise of the Soviet Rest Regime Chapter 8: The Mechanics and Energetics of Soviet Communism: The Poetics of Peat Mechanics Energetics Resistance of Material Conclusions Chapter 9: Leonid Brezhnev and the Elixir of Life The Sovereign’s Body The Social Body The Elixir of Life The Soviet Methuselah Dreams of Death Rejections of Life Extension Conclusion: A Rotten Stump Chapter 10: Russian Oil: Tragic Past, Radiant Future, and the Resurrection of the Dead Toward a Cultural Phenomenology of Oil The Dialectics of Soviet Oil Chapter 11: Of Mice and Degenerators: Post-progress Energy and Posthuman Bodies in Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx Nuclear Energy Gasoline Books Chapter 12: Hydrocarbons on Hold: Energy Aesthetics of Teriberka in the Russian Arctic The Powerful Work of Energy Latent Energy on the Arctic Edge Energy Aesthetics in Teriberka, Russia Latent Energy Aesthetic Nature’s Spiritual Energy Aesthetic “New Life” Aesthetic Conclusion Chapter 13: Afterword on Chernobyl (2019): A Soviet Propaganda Win Delivered 33 Years Late Index