EVERYTHING WAS FOREVER, UNTIL IT WAS NO MORE by Alexei Yurchak ( 9780691121178 )

Item Details

Title:

EVERYTHING WAS FOREVER, UNTIL IT WAS NO MORE
THE LAST SOVIET GENERATION

By:

Alexei Yurchak

Format:

Paperback

List price:

£35.00

Our price:

£28.00

Discount:

20% off

You save:

£7.00

ISBN 10:

0691121176

ISBN 13:

9780691121178

Availability:

Usually dispatched within 3-5 days.

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Stock:

Currently 7 available

Publisher:

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

3 October, 2005

Series:

In-Formation

Pages:

352

Description:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. Focusing on the transformation of the 1950's at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, this book traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, and pursuits that this transformation enabled.

Synopsis:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation. Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period. The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self, truth and lie--and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.

Illustrations:

15 halftones. 3 line illus. 4 tables.

Publication:

Imprint:

Princeton University Press

Prizes:

Winner of Prosvetitel (Enlightener) Book Prize 2015 Winner of Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, American Association for the

Returns:

Returnable

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EVERYTHING WAS FOREVER, UNTIL IT WAS NO MORE

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