The Life Cycle of Russian Things re-orients commodity studies using interdisciplinary and comparative methods to foreground unique Russian and Soviet materials as varied as apothecary wares, isinglass, limestone and tanks. It also transforms modernist and Western interpretations of the material by emphasizing the commonalities of the Russian experience.
Expert contributors from across the United States, Canada, Britain, and Germany come together to situate Russian material culture studies at an interdisciplinary crossroads. Drawing upon theory from anthropology, history, and literary and museum studies, the volume presents a complex narrative, not only in terms of material consumption but also in terms of production and the secondary life of inheritance, preservation, or even destruction. In doing so, the book reconceptualises material culture as a lived experience of sensory interaction. The Life Cycle of Russian Things sheds new light on economic history and consumption studies by reflecting the diversity of Russia’s experiences over the last 400 years.
List of Illustrations The Life Cycle of Russian Things: An Introduction, Matthew P. Romaniello (Weber State University, USA), Alison K. Smith (University of Toronto, Canada), and Tricia Starks (University of Arkansas, USA) Part I - Transforming Things 1. Immateriality and Intermateriality: The Vanishing Centrality of Apothecary Wares in 17th-Century Russian Medicine, Clare Griffin (Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan) 2. Transnational Information, Local Commodity: Lime and Limestone in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Alison K. Smith (University of Toronto, Canada) 3. Underground Materials: The (Un-)making of Samizdat Texts, Ann Komaromi (University of Toronto, Canada) Part II - Making Things 4. Making Fish Guts into Isinglass and Glue, Matthew P. Romaniello (Weber State University, USA) 5. Weaving a Strong Cloth: Textiles on the Chikhachev Estate in 1830s Vladimir Province, Katherine Pickering Antonova (CUNY, Queen’s College, USA) 6. Sugar as a ‘Basic Necessity’: State Efforts to Supply the Russian Empire’s Population in the Early 20th Century, Charles Steinwedel (Northeastern Illinois University, USA) Part III - Touching Things 7. Making Samovars Russian, Audra Yoder (Independent Scholar) 8. ‘Constant Companions’: Fabergé Tobacco Cases and Sensory Prompts to Addiction in Late Imperial Russia, Tricia Starks (University of Arkansas, USA) 9. Socialism in One Tank: The T-34 as Microcosm, Brandon Schechter (New York University, USA) Part IV - Preserving Things 10. Binding Siberia: Semen Remezov’s Khorograficheskaia Kniga in Time and Through Time, Erika Monahan (University of New Mexico, USA) 11. ‘Rather Poor and Threadbare’: Scratching Woman, Bogoraz, and a Shaman’s Coat at the American Museum of Natural History, Marisa Franz Karyl (New York University, USA) 12. Art Protection in the Second World War, Ulrike Schmiegelt-Rietig (Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation, Germany) Bibliography Index
Matthew P. Romaniello is Associate Professor of History at Weber State University, USA. He is the author of Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia (2019) and The Elusive Empire: Kazan and the Creation of Russia, 1552-1671 (2012). He is also the editor of The Journal of World History and five edited volumes, including two with Tricia Starks. Alison K. Smith is Chair and Professor of History at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Caviar and Cabbage: A History of Food and Drink in Russia (2021), For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being: Social Estates in Imperial Russia (2014), and Recipes for Russia: Food and Nationhood under the Tsars (2008). Tricia Starks is Director of the Humanities Center and Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, USA. She is the author of Smoking under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia (2018) and The Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene and the Revolutionary State (2008). She is also the co-editor, along with Matthew P. Romaniello, of Tobacco in Russian History and Culture: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present (2009).
Reviews for The Life Cycle of Russian Things: From Fish Guts to Fabergé, 1600 - Present
[A] welcome addition to the growing literature on material culture in Russian history. The editors should be commended for the ways in which they balanced the chapters and for including subjects drawn from the Muscovite, Imperial, and Soviet periods. * Russian Review * In this engaging book, readers learn what different meanings individual objects acquired through their lifespan, and in the different places that they found themselves in, and how they were able to form different relationships with those who saw, touched, and used them depending on the setting. In doing so, this study offers an innovative perspective of the Russian past. * Julia Mannherz, Associate Professor of Modern History, University of Oxford, UK * This welcome contribution to the material history of the Russian space offers a provocative and useful guide for thinking about things and doing material history. -- Diane P. Koenker, UCL SSEES, UK * Slavonic & East European Review *
