Monthly Archives: April 2018

The Art of Soviet Cooking and Edible Ethnicity

These two readings conveyed some very different ideas about food as part of the Soviet experience. One thing Scott chose to highlight in the “Edible Ethnicity” reading was the importance of the ritual in food consumption, highlighting the importance of … Continue reading

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SCOTT, EDIBLE ETHNICITY: Consumption is my favorite buzz word

“Far from being simply an administrative category, ethnicity itself became edible, and Sovietness something one could consume around the table.” As I did this reading, I kept thinking about what the organized attention to multi-ethnic cuisine meant for the Soviet … Continue reading

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Tashkent: Forging a Soviet City – The Home Stretch

Speaking about the Chilanzar apartment block, Paul Stronski claimed that the Soviet government “aimed to transform the city for the benefit of its residents, astonish its foreign visitors, and solidify the power of the state over city residents.” (221) This … Continue reading

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Tashkent: Forging A Soviet City, and City Forging You

In contrast to Tsarist policy shown in Chapter 2, the Soviets aimed to break down the geographic, ethnic, and cultural segregation in Tashkent between the Uzbek Old City and the Russian newer area. Besides the squalid conditions endured in the … Continue reading

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Uzbek Music’s Separate Path: Interpreting ‘Anticosmopolitanism’ in Stalinist Central Asia and Stalin’s Music Prize

Kiril Tomoff in his text mentions the “Kul’tura i zhizn’” articles. According to Tomoff, these articles considered certain cosmopolitan authors of music textbooks betrayers, because the authors devalued classical Russian music criticism and underestimated the accomplishments of nineteenth-century Russian composers. … Continue reading

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National in Form, Socialist in Content

Frolova-Walker’s discussion of Soviet attitudes toward folk music struck me as particularly interesting. Folk music, almost by definition, harkens back to earlier time and for the Soviet linear view of history it makes sense that this would be seen as … Continue reading

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Nationalist and Form and Socialist in Content?

The first thing that struck me from the reading was the dominance of “Russian” music in the international sphere and the Soviet sphere. The distinctly Russian style that is regarded so highly internationally and within the Union clouds the nationalization … Continue reading

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Beau Monde and The Golden Calf

In chapter 4, Fowler discusses the role of national culture in theater and how that was different in Moscow or St. Petersburg than in the other republics. He says, “Elissa Bemporad argues that the Yiddish theatre in Minsk was more … Continue reading

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