Soviet Everyday Life
Course Outline
Spring 2011
TuTh 4:00-5:45
Oakes 106
William Nickell
103 Cowell
bnickell@ucsc.edu
Office Hours: Wed 11:00-1:00
and by appointment
March 31: Reading spaces Alexander Genis: from Red Bread: “America From A to Y” (Especially Bar, Bathroom, Garage, Restaurant, University), “Brodsky in New York,” “Red Bread”
Michel de Certeau – “Spatial Stories” (The Practice of Everyday Life, 115-130)
Optional Reference Reading:
de Certeau “A Common Place: Ordinary Language” (1-14), “Popular Cultures: Ordinary Language” (15-28)
Stephen C. Hutchings, “Narrative and the Everyday: Myth, Image, Sign, Icon, Life” (Russian
modernism: the transfiguration of the everyday, 13-44) Crowley & Reid – “Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc” (Socialist Spaces, 1-22)
From Stites: Revolutionary Dreams (Ch. 9-10, pp. 190-222) Zamyatin: “The Cave”
Apr. 7: Creating Social(ist) Space: Melnikov and Miliutin
F. Starr, “Bearings in a New World (1917-1921),” “Architecture and Daily Life (1926-1928)” (Melnikov: Solo Architect in a Mass Society, 107-147, 240-258)
N.A. Miliutin, Sotsgorod
View in class: scenes from Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera
Optional Reference Reading:
F. Starr, “Architecture Against Death” (Melnikov: Solo Architect in a Mass Society, 31-53)
Sergei Oushakine, “The Flexible and the Pliant: Disturbed Organisms of Modernity” (Cultural
Anthropology, Vol. 19, No. 3, 392-428).
Milka Bliznakov – “Soviet Housing in the Experimental Years, 1918-1933” (Russian Housing in
the Modern Age, 85-148)
Mayakovsky, selected poems Bulgakov, “Moscow in the 1920s”
Zoshchenko, “The Crisis” (Nervous People, 137-140)
Apr. 14: Socialist Puritanism
Aleksandra Kollontai, “Vasilissa Malygina”
Optional Reference Reading:
Naiman “Revolutionary Anorexia” (Sex in Public, 208-249)
Arvatov: “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing” (sendout)
Film: Abram Room, Bed and Sofa (1929)
Victor Buchli, “Khruschev, Modernism, and the Fight against Petit-bourgeois Consciousness in
the Soviet Home” (Journal of Design History 10 (1997): 161-176)
Kristin Roth-Ey, “Finding a Home for Television in the USSR, 1950-1970” (Slavic Review 66:2, 278-306)
View: Footage of “The Kitchen Debate”
Apr. 21: Apartment and Dacha
Vera Dunham, “The Big Deal” (In Stalin’s Time, 3-23) Katherine Eaton, “Housing” (Daily Life in the Soviet Union, 153-174)
Stephen Lovell, “Soviet Exurbia: Dachas in Postwar Russia” (Socialist Spaces: 105-119)
Optional Reference Reading:
Vladimir Paperny, “Men, Women & the Living Space” (Russian Housing in the Modern Age,
149-170)
Randi Cox, “All This Can Be Yours! Soviet Commercial Advertising and the Social Construction
of Space, 1928-1956 (The Landscape of Stalinism, 125-162)
Susan Reid, “Destalinization and Taste, 1953-1963 (Journal of Design History 10:2 (1997): 177-
201)
Natalya Baranskaya, “A Week Like Any Other”
Elizabeth Wood “Daily Life and Gender Transformation” (The Baba and the Comrade, 194-214)
Deborah Field, “Mothers and Fathers and the Problem of Selfishness in the Khrushchev Period”
(Women in the Khrushchev Era, 96-113)
Apr. 28: Children
Catriona Kelly, “Future Race: Regulating the Everyday Life of Children in Early Soviet Russia”
(Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia, 256-281)
Susan Reid, “Khruschev’s Children’s Paradise: The Pioneer Palace, Moscow 1958-1962” (Socialist
Spaces, 141-179)
Optional Reference Reading:
Francine du Plessix Gray, “Masters & Johnson in Leningrad,” “Maya,” “Why They Dress Up”
Barbara Holland, “’A Woman’s Right to Choose’ in the Soviet Union” (Home, School, and
Leisure in the Soviet Union, 55-69)
Deborah Field, “Sexual Morality, Abortion, and the Limits of Intervention” (Private Life and
Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia, 51-65)
Film: Vladimir Menshov, Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears (1980)
Joseph Brodsky, “In a Room and a Half” (Less Than One, 447-501)
May 5: The Kitchen
Susan Reid, “The Khrushchev Kitchen: Domesticating the Scientific-Technological Revolution”
(Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 40, No. 2, 289-316)
Optional Reference Reading:
Gerasimova – “Public Privacy in the Soviet Communal Apartment” (Soviet Spaces, 207-230)
Susan Reid – “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the Se-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the
Soviet Union under Khrushchev” (Slavic Review, Vol. 61, No. 2, 211-252).
Klaus Mehnert, “Too Many Russians Chasing Too Few Books” (The Russians and Their
Favorite Books, 13-30)
Jenny Brine, “Reading as a Leisure Pursuit in the USSR” (Home, School, and Leisure in the Soviet
Union, 239-269)
May 12: Dissident life and literature
Vladimir Voinovich, Ivankiad Listen: Interview with Vyacheslav Igrunov
Optional Reference Reading:
Aleksei Yurchak, “Living Vnye: Deterritorialized Milieus” (Everything Was Forever, Until it Was
No More, 126-157)
Lev Rubinshtein, “Communal Fiction” (in Strange Soviet Practices)
Film – Bela Tarr, Prefab People (1982)
May 19: Living outside the apartment
Venadikt Erofeev, Moscow-Petushki
Optional Reference Reading:
Nancy Ries, “Our Fairy Tale Life: The Narrative Construction of Russia, Women, and Men”
(Russian Talk, 42-82)
Blair Ruble, “From Khrushcheby to Korobki” (Russian Housing in the Modern Age, 232-270)
Ilya Kabakov, Ten Characters
May 26: Kabakov (cont.)
Kabakov “On Emptiness” (Re-Entering the Sign, 91-98)
Kabakov, Tupitsyn, “About Installation” (Art Journal, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Winter 1999), 66-73.)
Optional Reference Reading:
Boris Groys and Ilya Kabakov (Interview)
Boym, “On Diasporic Intimacy: Ilya Kabakov’s Installations and Immigrant Homes.” (Critical
Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 2, Intimacy. (Winter, 1998), pp. 498-524)
Svetlana Boym, “Everyday Culture” (Russian Culture at the Crossroads, 157-184)
Boym, “From the Toilet to the Museum: Memory and Metamorphosis of Soviet Trash”
(Consuming Russia, 383-396)
Theresa Sabonis-Chafee, “Communism as Kitsch: Soviet Symbols in Post-Soviet Russia”
(Consuming Russia, 362-382)
Irina Paperno, “Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience”
June 2: Soviet/Russian Post-Modernity
Mikhail Epstein, “The Origins of Russian Post-Modernism” (Re-Entering the Sign, 25-47)
Anna Krylova, “Saying Lenin and Meaning Party’: Subversion and Laughter in Late Soviet
Society” (Consuming Russia, 243-265).
Optional Reference Reading:
Jochen Hellbeck, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts.”
(Russian Review, 60:3, 340-359).
Mark Allen Svede, “Curtains: Décor for the End of Empire” (Socialist Spaces, 231-248)
Svetlana Boym, selections from Common Places
Condee & Padunov, “The ABC of Russian Consumer Culture” (Soviet Hieroglyphics, 130-172)
Required Texts (available at Literary Guillotine):
Alexander Genis – Red Bread (ISBN-13: 978-5717200509)
Kollontai – Love of Worker Bees (ISBN-13: 978-0897330015)
Venedikt Erofeev - Moscow to the End of the Line (ISBN-13: 978-0810112001)
Kabakov – The Man Who Flew Into Space from His Apartment (ISBN-13: 978-1846380044)
Socialist Spaces (Crowley & Reid, eds.) ISBN-13: 978-1859735336
Assignments
One of the following:
All work for the course should be completed and turned in at my office by 4:00 p.m. on June 9.