Product Details
Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power

Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power
By Mr. Richard Stites

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Product Description

Serf-era and provincial Russia heralded the spectacular turn in cultural history that began in the 1860s. Examining the role of arts and artists in society’s value system, Richard Stites explores this shift in a groundbreaking history of visual and performing arts in the last decades of serfdom. Provincial town and manor house engaged the culture of Moscow and St. Petersburg while thousands of serfs and ex-serfs created or performed. Mikhail Glinka raised Russian music to new levels and Anton Rubinstein struggled to found a conservatory. Long before the itinerants, painters explored town and country in genre scenes of everyday life. Serf actors on loan from their masters brought naturalistic acting from provincial theaters to the imperial stages. Stites’s richly detailed book offers new perspectives on the origins of Russia’s nineteenth-century artistic prowess.

Product Details

  • Published on: 2005-12-14
  • Released on: 2005-12-14
  • Format: Kindle eBook
  • Number of items: 1

Editorial Reviews

Review
"This book is the latest of Stites''s panoramic yet densely detailed studies of Russian culture, and it will undoubtedly prove as invaluable to scholars, students, and general-interest readers as his previous books have done. Russian Studies is blessed to have in Stites an energetic and rigorous cultural historian of both the imperial and Soviet periods. Stites possesses an extraordinary capacity to decipher complex social and institutional formations and thereby to underscore key issues in cultural politics by creating a picture of satisfying specificity. Nobody does it better."Julie Buckler, Harvard University -- Julie Buckler

About the Author
Richard Stites is professor of history in the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.