Books
Russian Culture under Putin
TThis timely text charts the metamorphosis of Russian media and culture in the 21st century. It considers how, when Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, Russia's media and culture industry had enjoyed nearly a decade of almost unrestricted freedom and yet, by the time he launched his illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia's independent media was crushed, while the few viable opposition figures were either imprisoned, exiled, or dead under mysterious circumstances.
Eliot Borenstein looks at the manufactured cult of Putin, the competing models of Russianness put forth in the media, the obsession with nostalgia and the limits on imagining the future, the rise of aggressive patriotism and the myth of ancient Russian 'traditional' values, the significance of the fight against 'gay propaganda', and the absurdist strategies used by the opposition in the face of increasing restrictions on free speech. Though the book's title invokes Putin, Russian Culture under Putin does not cast the Russian leader as an all-knowing genius pursuing a master plan. The culture of the past twenty years, both official and independent, has been largely improvisational. 21st-century Russia, as Borenstein demonstrates so masterfully, has not been frog-marched into unfreedom, but has in fact lurched back and forth on a dimly-lit path.
Today's Russia, Unstuck in Time suggests, is a nation of time travelers, living either in memories of the Great Patriotic War and a society that provided for all its citizens or in an alternative future in which the USSR never collapsed. Eliot Borenstein examines the ways in which films, fiction, television, social media, political parties, and even theme parks use the conventions of time travel and alternate history to fantasize about narratives that are more appealing than the post-Soviet present.
Unstuck in Time explores the centrality of an uncannily persistent USSR in the post-Soviet cultural imagination through deeply engaged and entertaining readings of an impressive array of texts: fantasies in which characters time-crash into the Soviet past, fictions of triumphant far-future Soviet societies, and real-life enterprises feeding the belief that the Soviet Union never ended. Whether channeled into benign nostalgia or dangerous mythmaking, the cases that Borenstein analyzes reveal the extent to which the psychic shock of the end of the Soviet Union left Russians adrift, caught between a past many still long for and a future few can imagine.
Unstuck in Time: On the Post-Soviet Uncanny
This book unpacks and analyzes the central themes of sacrifice, melancholy, apocalypticism, and the nature of family and home in HBO’s The Leftovers to demonstrate the key role it played in the development of early twenty-first-century television. I argue that the story of The Leftovers is the most sustained exploration of loss ever to appear on American television and subverts the expectations of viewers who look to prestige dramas as puzzles to solve by providing no clear answers the mysteries most central to the show’s plot. Instead, the series endeavors to provide more nuanced and realistic portrayals of the melancholy that occurs when people’s lives are unmoored, leavening an inherently depressing experience with absurdity and moments of grace.
HBO’s The Leftovers: Mourning and Melancholy on Premium Cable
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, writers, filmmakers, performers, and a host of online communities have grappled with the question of a post-Soviet Russian identity. Soviet Self-Hatred explores the tension between anxiety and self-aggrandizement that has led to an identification with the Orcs of Tolkien and fueled hostility to the very idea of Ukraine.
Soviet Self-Hatred: The Secret Identities of Post-Socialism
A study of writers’ attempts to convey interiority in a commercial medium presumed to be aimed at children, Marvel in the 1970s pays particular attention to the work of Steve Gerber (Howard the Duck), Steve Englehart (Doctor Strange; The Avengers), Doug Moench (Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu), Marv Wolfman, (Tomb of Dracula), and Don McGregor (Killraven and The Black Panther).
Reviews
Jonathan Russell Clark. Esquire
Marvel in the 1970s: The World Inside Your Head
Meanwhile, in Russia…: Russian Internet Memes and Viral Video
My second entry in Bloomsbury’s Russian Shorts series. Probably the most fun material I’ve every worked with.
Publisher’s Description:
The Russian internet is a hotbed for memes and viral videos: the political, satirical and simply absurd compete for attention in Russia while the West turns to it for an endless reserve of humorous content. But how did this powerful cyber community grow out of the repressive media environment of the Soviet Union? What does this viral content reveal about the country, its politics and its culture? And why are the memes and videos of today's Russia so popular, spreading so rapidly across the globe?
Reviews
August Bremerton (H-Net)
Jonathan Z. Ludwig (Europe-Asia Studies)
Allison Rowley (Slavic Review)
Pussy Riot: Speaking Punk to Power
One of the first books in Bloomsbury’s Russian Shorts series, this book assumes no background in things Russian. It was also fun to write. .
Publisher’s Description:
Both more and less than a band, Pussy Riot is continually misunderstood by the Western media. This book sets the record straight.
After their scandalous performance of an anti-Putin protest song in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the imprisonment of two of its members, the punk feminist art collective known as Pussy Riot became an international phenomenon. But, what, exactly, is Pussy Riot, and what are they trying to achieve? The award-winning author Eliot Borenstein explores the movement's explosive history and takes you beyond the hype.
Reviews
Alison Rowley (Slavic Review)
Benjamin Nathans (Times Literary Supplement)
Sona Singh (Europe-Asia Studies)
Nataliya Tchermalykh (Laboratorium)
Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism
I’ve been fascinated by conspiracy theories for most of my life, and post-Soviet Russia did not exactly cure me of my preoccupation. As an experiment, i serialized the first draft of this book on plotsagainstrussia.org, and along the way developed my own approach to the nature of conspiracy.. Cornell published the revised version in 2019, and it received the Wayne S. Vucinich prize for “most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences” in 2020, and the, 2020 AATSEEL Best Book in Cultural Studies.
Publisher’s Description:
In this original and timely assessment of cultural expressions of paranoia in contemporary Russia, Eliot Borenstein samples popular fiction, movies, television shows, public political pronouncements, internet discussions, blogs, and religious tracts to build a sense of the deep historical and cultural roots of konspirologiia that run through Russian life. Plots against Russia reveals through dramatic and exciting storytelling that conspiracy and melodrama are entirely equal-opportunity in modern Russia, manifesting themselves among both pro-Putin elites and his political opposition. As Borenstein shows, this paranoid fantasy until recently characterized only the marginal and the irrelevant. Now, through its embodiment in pop culture, the expressions of a conspiratorial worldview are seen everywhere. Plots against Russia is an important contribution to the fields of Russian literary and cultural studies from one of its preeminent voices.
Reviews
Birgit Beumers (Slavic Review)
Magda Dolińska-Rydzek (Eurpe-Asia Studies)
Alexey Golubev (H-Net)
Stephen Hutchings (Journal of Modern History)
Emily Johnson (Slavic and East European Journal)
Pavel Khazanov (The Russian Review)
Amy Knight (TLS)
Louis Train (Lossi 36)
Julia Zuber (Laboratorium)
Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture
At some point before the year 2000,, someone asked me if I was writing a book about Russian popular culture. Which is when I realized that that’s what I was doing. Then Cornell published it. Overkill won the 2008 AWSS Award for Best Book in Women’s/Gender Studies.
Publishers’ Description:
Perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union transformed every aspect of life in Russia, and as hope began to give way to pessimism, popular culture came to reflect the anxiety and despair felt by more and more Russians. Free from censorship for the first time in Russia's history, the popular culture industry (publishing, film, and television) began to disseminate works that featured increasingly explicit images and descriptions of sex and violence.
Reviews:
Susanne M. Cohen (H-NET)
Jane Costlow (Slavonica)
Alexander Etkind (Slavic Review)
Jeremy Morris (Europe-Asia Studies)
Lilya Kaganovsky (SEEJ)
Elizabeth Skomp (Slavonic and East European Review)
Men Without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929
Based on my dissertation, Men Without Women was published in 2000 by Duke University Press, which quickly remaindered it. I got to buy dozens of copies at $1 each, so there’s that.
It won an award from AATSEEL for Best Book in Literary / Cultural Scholarship in 2001. That was a nice way to start the millennium.
Publisher’s description:
In Men without Women Eliot Borenstein examines the literature of the early Soviet period to shed new light on the iconic Russian concept of comradeship. By analyzing a variety of Russian writers who span the ideological spectrum, Borenstein provides an illuminating reading of the construction of masculinity in Soviet culture. In each example he identifies the replacement of blood ties with ideology and the creation of a social order in which the family has been supplanted by the collective.
Reviews:
Patricia Carden (Slavic Review)
Sibelan Forrester (Modern Fiction Studies)
Rebecca Friedman (Canadian American Slavic Studies)
Rolf Hellebust (Slavic and East European Journal)
Katharine Hodgson (Slavonica)
Bożena Karwowska (Canadian Review of Comparative Literature)
Ronald D. LeBlanc (Russian Review)
Laura L Phillips (Canadian Slavonic Papers)
Andrei Sinelnikov (Men and Masculinities)
Russian Postmodernism: Dialogue with Chaos, by Mark Lipovetsky
The first of many brilliant English-language books by Mark Lipovetsky. All I did was edit and co-translate it. Russian Postmodernism was published in 1999 by M.E. Sharpe (now part of Routledge).
Publisher’s description:
This text offers a critical study of postmodernism in Russian literature. It takes some of the central issues of the critical debate to develop a conception of postmodern poetics as a dialogue with chaos and places Russian literature in the context of an enriched postmodernism.