On Russian Soil , livre ebook
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2021
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204
pages
English
Ebooks
2021
Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Publié par
Date de parution
15 juin 2021
EAN13
9781501755712
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
2 Mo
Blending close readings of literature, films, and other artworks with analysis of texts of political philosophy, science, and social theory, Mieka Erley offers an interdisciplinary perspective on attitudes to soil in Russia and the Soviet Union from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. As Erley shows in On Russian Soil, the earth has inspired utopian dreams, reactionary ideologies, social theories, and durable myths about the relationship between nation and nature.In this period of modernization, soil was understood as the collective body of the nation, sitting at the crux of all economic and social problems. The "soil question" was debated by nationalists and radical materialists, Slavophiles and Westernizers, poets and scientists.On Russian Soil highlights a selection of key myths at the intersection of cultural and material history that show how soil served as a natural, national, and symbolic resource from Fedor Dostoevsky's native soil movement to Nikita Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign at the Soviet periphery in the 1960s. Providing an original contribution to ecocriticism and environmental humanities, Erley expands our understanding of how cultural processes write nature and how nature inspires culture.On Russian Soil brings Slavic studies into new conversations in the environmental humanities, generating fresh interpretations of literary and cultural movements and innovative readings of major writers.
Voir
Publié par
Date de parution
15 juin 2021
EAN13
9781501755712
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
2 Mo
ON RUSSIAN SOIL
A volume in the NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Edited by Christine D. Worobec For a list of books in the series, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.
ON RUSSIAN SOIL
MY T H AND MAT E RI AL I TY
M i e k a E r l e y
NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS an imprint of Cornell University Press Ithaca and London
Copyright © 2021 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.
First published 2021 by Cornell University Press
Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Names: Erley, Mieka, author. Title: On Russian soil : myth and materiality / Mieka Erley.Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2021. | Series: NIU series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020051001 (print) | LCCN 2020051002 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501755699 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501755705 (epub) | ISBN 9781501755712 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Human ecology—Russia. | Soils— Philosophy. | Cultural landscapes—Russia. | Soils— Mythology—Russia. Classification: LCC GF601 .E75 2021 (print) | LCC GF601 (ebook) | DDC 631.40947—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051001 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc. gov/2020051002
Cover illustration: P. S. Danilov,Pervaia borozda, canvas and oil, 1957–58. A. Kasteyev Museum of Arts, Republic of Kazakhstan.
Co nte nts
Preface vii Acknowledgments ix Note on Transliteration and Translation xi
Introduction: Groundwork 1. Native Soil: The Roots of the Organic Nation 2. Matter: Models of Soil and Society 3. Dirt: Dirty Literature 4. Sediment: Soviet Construction on Asian Soil 5. Wasteland: Platonov’s Dialectics of Waste and Recuperation 6. Virgin Land: The Libidinal Economy of Virgin Land Epilogue: Beyond Earth
Notes 135 Bibliography 165 Index 181
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P r e f a c e
In a family photograph from the 1920s, my grandmother and her sister, toddlers with bobbed hair, are sitting in a field encircled by chickens on the farm their mother owned in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky. As children, they worked alongside their mother in this field, setting tobacco, planting strawberries, and picking beans for market through the years of the Great Depression. I have fond memories of child hood visits to the farm, where muddy cattle trails ran alongside the Little Elk horn creek, and where a stunning variety of wildflowers grew—Solomon’sseal, stonecrop, and the quaintly named butterandeggs plant, which I col lected and pressed in a botanical album. But by the 1980s there was already a decisive consolidation of industrial farming in the United States. With encroaching development, the decline of tobacco, and the rise of big agri business, few small family farms in Kentucky like my grandmother’s were sustainable by the close of the Reagan era. In 1996, after the passing of my greatgrandmother, aged 101, on the farm she had lived on her entire life, most of that farmland was sold for suburban tract houses. In our private life it was the end of four generations of farmers on that Bluegrass land, and in America it was the definitive end of the great georgic myth of America as an agrarian republic of smallholders. In America as in Russia, many of us are only a few generations away from working the land and the constant attention to seasonal cycles, weather, fer tilizer, and above all, the condition of the soil. The Green Revolution that enabled this demographic shift over the course of the twentieth century did not solve what nineteenthcentury Russians called the “soil question” but rather rendered it invisible in many parts of the industrialized world. But the soil question has returned to visibility in recent years, from the growth of communitysupported agriculture and the revival of small organic farms to internet discussions about the lack of micronutrients in industrially farmed food. As Wendell Berry writes, “The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. . . . Without proper care for it we can have no 1 community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”
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viiiPREFACE
This book is a historical study of a distinctive place and time, but it is motivated by a broader desire to understand how people make sense of thehard material realities of the human condition—in this case our depen dency on the soil to feed ourselves—and how these material realities shape our dreams and myths. Agriculture has been our security against the state of bare life, but climate change has made us more aware of the fragility of our existence, our dependence on nature, and the limits of our ability to solve any problem with technology, and we are again urgently revisiting questions about how we use our limited arable land. Soil remains an ongoing source of material resistance in a world of fric tionless data, where the immaterial dialectic of binary code seems to master all material flows. However virtual life may appear, “grain is still grain,” in the words of Leonid Brezhnev, and soil is still soil. One day we may indeed loosen our immemorial ties to the soil as technological innovations offer new means of food production, but for now our dependency on the soil is a univer sal condition that unites human societies across millennia. The story of Rus sia’s relationship to its soil may serve to remind us of the conditions of food scarcity that were once a central feature of human experience—conditionsthat still persist in the developing world and that, in the age of planetary climate change, may once again come to define our lives.
A c k n o w l e d g m e nt s
No book is produced by the author alone. I am indebted to everyone who supported this project or shared their time, energy, and ideas. Sam Hodgkin more than anyone else enabled this project to materialize and shared the burdens that it entailed over many years. My sincere thanks also go to my colleagues in the Russian and Eurasian Studies Program at Colgate University: Sergei Domashenko, Jessica Graybill, Caro lyn Guile, Ian Helfant, Alexander Nakhimovsky, Alice Nakhimovsky, Nancy Ries, and Kira Stevens. I am especially grateful to Alice Nakhimovsky for staying on message about what it takes to finish a book. Language is the foundation of this project, and I thank those who taught me Russian language and literature at Hampshire College and Amherst Col lege, especially Joanna Hubbs, Stanley Rabinowitz, Viktoria Schweitzer, Catherine Ciepiela, Tatyana Babyonysheva, and Jane Taubman. In the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Cali fornia, Berkeley, Lisa Little and Anna Muza supported my development as a teacher and ongoing student of Russian. It was a privilege to have such read ers as Irina Paperno, Olga Matich, Eric Naiman, Harsha Ram, Anne Nesbet, and Viktor Zhivov, and I am further indebted to Joachim Klein for sharing his expertise on topics as varied as pastoral poetry and the history of the Belo mor Canal. I owe Irina Paperno and Olga Matich a special debt of gratitude for their generous support and care. They have fundamentally and indelibly shaped how I think. Thanks go to all the editors and staff at NIU Press and Cornell Press, including Christine D. Worobec, Jennifer Savran Kelly, and especially Amy Farranto for her support through the life changes that occurred between the contract and final manuscript. I am grateful to Andy Bruno and Thomas Newlin, who reviewed this manuscript for NIU Press and who took time, in the midst of a pandemic, to generously share their ideas and discuss specific problems. Any shortcomings in this text are my own, of course. A formative influence on this book was the Eurasian Environments con ference in 2011 at Ohio State University, organized by Nicholas Breyfogle.
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