University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 Russia Eternal: Recalling The Imperial Era In Late- And Post-Soviet Literature And Culture Pavel Khazanov University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Eastern European Studies Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, European History Commons, and the European Languages and Societies Commons Recommended Citation Khazanov, Pavel, "Russia Eternal: Recalling The Imperial Era In Late- And Post-Soviet Literature And Culture" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2894. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2894 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2894 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Russia Eternal: Recalling The Imperial Era In Late- And Post-Soviet Literature And Culture Abstract The return of Tsarist buildings, narratives and symbols has been a prominent facet of social life in post- Soviet Russia. My dissertation aims to explain this phenomenon and its meaning by tracking contemporary Russia’s cultural memory of the Imperial era. By close-reading both popular and influential cultural texts, as well as analyzing their conditions of production and reception, I show how three generations of Russian cultural elites from the 1950s until today have used Russia’s past to fight present- day political battles, and outline how the cultural memory of the Imperial epoch continues to inform post- Soviet Russian leaders and their mainstream detractors. Chapters One and Two situate the origin of Russian culture’s current engagement with the pre-Revolutionary era in the social dynamic following Stalin’s death in 1953.