Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age

The Word as Image

By Stephen Hutchings

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About the Book

This book explores how one of the world's most literary-oriented societies entered the modern visual era, beginning with the advent of photography in the nineteenth century, focusing then on literature's role in helping to shape cinema as a tool of official totalitarian culture during the Soviet period, and concluding with an examination of post-Soviet Russia's encounter with global television. As well as pioneering the exploration of this important new area in Slavic Studies, the book illuminates aspects of cultural theory by investigating how the Russian case affects general notions of literature's fate within post-literate culture, the ramifications of communism's fall for media globalization, and the applicability of text/image models to problems of intercultural change.

Reviews

'I also want to point out the exceptional theoretical base of the author’s analysis ... this makes this book a valuable addition to the growing field of contemporary Russian interdisciplinary literary, film, media and cultural studies.' - Evgeny Dobrenko, Revolutionary Russia

'Hutchings offers a thought-provoking reading of the intersections between literature and the visual arts in the Russian prerevolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet periods ... Hutchings's book may be seen as an encouragement to reread and rethink the cultural tradition ... an important and even exciting book.' - Slavic Review

Table of Contents

Part 1 The Impact of Photography on Nineteenth Century Russian Fiction 1. In the Beginning was the Word
2. Realism and the Camera: Out from under Gogol's Portret 3. Mediation and Modernity in Nineteenth Century Russian Fiction Part 2 Literature, the Camera and the Shaping of a Soviet Official Sphere 4. The Word in Lights: The Soviet Writer as Media Star 5. Shooting the Canon: The Role of the Ekranizatsiia in Offical Stalinist Culture 6. The Canon under Fire: Film Adaptation at the Margins of Soviet State Ideology 7. Hamlet with a Guitar: Literature, Film and the Problem of Soviet Mass Cuture Conclusion: Literature and Post Soviet Identity in the Era of Global Television

About the Author(s)

Stephen Hutchings is Reader in Russian at the University of Surrey. He was formally Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Rochester, New York. He has published books on Leonid Andreev and on Russian modernist prose. He is currently grant-holder for a 3-year AHRB-funded project looking at post-Soviet television culture.