Joan Neuberger

Imitations of life : two centuries of melodrama in Russia

Imitations of Life views Russian melodrama from the eighteenth century to today as an unexpectedly hospitable forum for considering social issues. The contributors follow the evolution of the genre through a variety of cultural practices and changing political scenarios. They argue that Russian audiences have found a particular type of comfort in this mode of entertainment that invites them to respond emotionally rather than politically to social turmoil. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including plays, lachrymose novels, popular movies, and even highly publicised funerals and political trials, the essays in Imitations of Life argue that melodrama has consistently offered models of behaviour for times of transition, and that contemporary televised versions of melodrama continue to help Russians cope with national events that they understand implicitly but are not yet able to articulate. In contrast to previous studies, this collection argues for a reading that takes into account the subtle but pointed challenges to national politics and to gender and class hierarchies made in melodramatic works from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Collectively, the contributors shift and cross borders, illustrating how the cultural dismissal of melodrama as fundamentally escapist and targeted primarily at the politically disenfranchised has subverted the dramas own intrinsically subversive virtues. Imitations of Life will interest students and scholars of contemporary Russia, and Russian history, literature, and theatre. Contributors. Otto Boele, Julie Buckler, Julie Cassiday, Susan Costanzo, Helena Goscilo, Beth Holmgren, Lars Lih, Louise McReynolds, Joan Neuberger, Alexander Prokhorov, Richard Stites

Strange circus: Eisenstein's sex drawings

ABSTRACT Sergei Eisenstein made drawings more or less constantly from the time he was a child until the end of his life, with only a short break in the 1920s when he was making his first films. Among the thousands of preserved drawings is a large collection depicting people (and animals, and various anthropomorphized features of sexual anatomy) having sex. Rarely discussed or analysed, the sex drawings are usually seen in a purely biographical context, but they were thematically and aesthetically fundamental to Eisensteins artistic and theoretical writing, which explores the diverse ways that perception, consciousness and creativity originate in the body. Far from being only ‘the return of the repressed’, Eisenstein used the drawing process as a laboratory to examine the often violent extremes of desire as he was developing his ideas on the wellsprings of artistic creativity in the bodys inner divisions and the human wish for connection and ecstatic transcendence and transformation.