In Search of the True Russia: The Provinces in Contemporary Nationalist Discourse [Hardcover]

Russia's provinces have long held a prominent place in the nation's cultural imagination. Lyudmila Parts looks at the contested place of the provinces in twenty-first-century Russian literature and popular culture, addressing notions of nationalism, authenticity, Orientalism, Occidentalism, and postimperial identity.

Surveying a largely unexplored body of Russian journalism, literature, and film from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Parts finds that the harshest portrayals of the provinces arise within high culture. Popular culture, however, has increasingly turned from the newly prosperous, multiethnic, and westernized Moscow to celebrate the hinterlands as repositories of national traditions and moral strength. This change, she argues, has directed debate about Russia's identity away from its loss of imperial might and global prestige and toward a hermetic national identity based on the opposition of us vs. us rather than us vs. them. She offers an intriguing analysis of the contemporary debate over what it means to be Russian and where true Russians reside.

Looks at the contested place of the provinces in twenty-first-century Russia, surveying cultural discourse in journalism, literature, and film to analyze changing notions of nationalism, authenticity, and postimperial identity.

A fascinating study of how the internal Other of the provinces has been replacing the external Other of the West in post-Soviet cultural discourse. Useful for anyone interested in contemporary Russian culture.
Anne Lounsbery, New York University

Lyudmila Parts is an associate professor of Russian and Slavic studies at McGill University in Montreal. She is the author ofThe Chekhovian Intertext: Dialogue with a Classicand the editor ofThe Russian Twentieth-Century Short Story: A Critical Companion.

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