Porter Jillian, Vinokour Maya (eds.) Energy Culture: Work, Power, and Waste in Russia and the Soviet Union

Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. — 345 p. — (Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment). — ISBN 978-3-031-14319-9.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.Introduction:​ Energy Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union
The Energy of Chernyshevsky’s Vera Pavlovna in the Modern Cultural Economy
The Energy Trap: Anna Karenina as a Parable for the Twenty-First Century
Picturing Coal in the Donbas:​ Nikolai Kasatkin and the Energy of Late Realism
Polar Fantasies:​ Valery Bryusov and the Russian Symbolist Electric Aesthetic
Energetic Liquids in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Utopianism
Revolutionary Burnout and the Rise of the Soviet Rest Regime
The Mechanics and Energetics of Soviet Communism:​ The Poetics of Peat
Leonid Brezhnev and the Elixir of Life
Russian Oil:​ Tragic Past, Radiant Future, and the Resurrection of the Dead
Of Mice and Degenerators: Post-progress Energy and Posthuman Bodies in Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx
Hydrocarbons on Hold:​ Energy Aesthetics of Teriberka in the Russian Arctic
Afterword on Chernobyl (2019): A Soviet Propaganda Win Delivered 33 Years Late