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Author Steinberg, Mark D., 1953-

Title Proletarian imagination : self, modernity, and the sacred in Russia, 1910-1925 / Mark D. Steinberg
Published Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2002

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Description 1 online resource (xiii, 335 pages) : illustrations
Contents Cultural revolution: the making of a plebeian intelligentsia -- Knowledges of self -- The proletarian "I" -- The moral landscape of the modern city -- Revolutionary modernity and its discontents -- Feelings of the sacred -- Sacred vision in the revolution
Summary In fin-de-siècle and early revolutionary Russia, a group of self-educated workers produced a large body of poetry and prose in which they attempted to comprehend their rapidly changing world. Witnesses to wars and revolution, these men and women grappled on paper with the nature of civilization and the imperatives of ethical truth. In a strikingly original approach to Russian culture, Mark D. Steinberg listens to their words, which are little known today. The results of their literary creativity, he finds, were frequently not what the new Soviet order was expecting from its workers, despite its celebration of the notion of a proletarian art. Through insightful readings of a vast fund of lower-class writings, Steinberg shows that the authors focused above all on the uncertain nature and place of the self, the promise and dangers of modernity, and the qualities of the sacred in both their lives and their imaginations. Like their counterparts in the intelligentsia, these worker writers were ambivalent about Marxist ideology's celebration of the city and the factory and even about modern progress itself. Drawing on vast research, Steinberg demonstrates the texts' significance for an understanding of Russian popular mentalities, indeed for the very meaning, philosophically and morally, of these years of crisis and possibility at the end of the old order and the early years of the Soviet regime
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 313-325) and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
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Subject Russian literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
Working class writings, Russian -- History and criticism
Self in literature.
Holy, The, in literature.
Working class authors -- Soviet Union
Working class authors -- Russia
Working class -- Soviet Union -- Intellectual life
Working class -- Russia -- Intellectual life
LITERARY COLLECTIONS -- Russian & Former Soviet Union.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Social Classes.
Holy, The, in literature
Russian literature
Self in literature
Working class authors
Working class -- Intellectual life
Working class writings, Russian
Arbeiterklasse
Literatur
Religion
Russisch
Soziale Identität
Letterkunde.
Russisch.
Communisme.
Russia
Soviet Union
Russisch.
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781501717796
1501717790