Meanings and Values of Water in Russian Culture

Bringing together a team of scholars from the diverse fields of geography, literary studies and history, this is the first volume to study water as a cultural phenomenon within the Russian/Soviet context. Water in this context is both a cognitive and cultural construct and a geographical and physical phenomenon, representing particular rivers (the Volga, the Chusovaia in the Urals, the Neva) and bodies of water (from Baikal to sacred springs and the flowing water of nineteenth-century estates), but also powerful systems of meaning from traditional cultures and those forged in the radical restructuring undertaken in the 1930s. Individual chapters explore the polyvalence and contestation of meanings, dimensions and values given to water in various times and spaces in Russian history. The reservoir of symbolic association is tapped by poets and film makers but also by policy makers, the popular press and advertisers seeking to incite reaction or drive sales. The volume's emphasis on the cultural dimensions of water will link material that is often widely disparate in time and space; it will also serve as the methodological framework for the analysis undertaken both within chapters and in the editors' introduction.

Jane Costlow is the Clark A. Griffiths Professor of Environmental Studies at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine USA. Her scholarly work has focused primarily on 19th century Russian literature and visual culture, ranging from the novels of Ivan Turgenev to writing by Russian women writers and representations of the bear in late Imperial culture. Recent publications include Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the 19th century Forest (Cornell 2013) and, with Amy Nelson, Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History (Pittsburgh, 2010). At Bates she teaches courses in Environmental Humanities and Russian literature, interests reflected in recent papers and conference presentations on disaster narratives in film and oral history. Her translation of Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal’s The Tragic Menagerie received the AATSEEL prize for best translation in 1999.

Arja Rosenholm is Professor of Russian Language and Culture at the University of Tampere, Finland. Her research interests include the history of Russian literature and culture, gender studies, Russian popular culture and mass media, ecocriticism, space and culture. She is currently heading the Academy of Finland funded project called "Water as Cultural Space: Changing Values and Representations" (2012–16). Rosenholm has edited several scholarly volumes in English Russian and Finnish, published numerous peer-reviewed articles in international and national journals. Recent books include Women in Russian Cultural History (in Finnish), with Suvi Salmenniemi and Marja Sorvari. (Gaudeamus, 2014), and Topografii populiarnoi kul’tury together with Irina Savkina. (NLO 2015).