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Author:   Mollie Arbuthnot ,  Christianna Bonin ,  Gabriella Ferrari
Publisher:   Manchester University Press
Imprint:   Manchester University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 17.00cm , Height: 3.00cm , Length: 24.40cm
Weight:   1.034kg
ISBN:  

9781526182128

ISBN 10:   1526182122
Pages:   376
Publication Date:   07 April 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available, will be POD  
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Table of Contents

Introduction — Mollie Arbuthnot, Christianna Bonin, and Gabriella A. Ferrari PART I: LAND, WATER, ECOLOGIES 1 ‘And stones speak!’: mapping, mosaics, and the Soviet materiality of wonder — Christianna Bonin 2 Moving matters: Turksib and its orientations — Anel Rakhimzhanova 3 Seas of material residues, or diving into the wayward archive of the Moscow Canal — Nastia Volynova 4 Embodied nature: landscape as architecture during the Thaw — Masha Panteleyeva 5 Reflection: The materialism of Soviet stones, liquids, and landscapes — Andy Bruno PART II: WORDS, MATTER, MIND 6 The livingness of texts in Vladimir Sorokin and Dmitrii Prigov’s literature and performance art — Katerina Pavlidi 7 Kruchenykh’s explosive texts: elemental anarchy in the gelatine press and the gelatine bomb — Kamila Kocialkowska 8 Formalists-Materialists — Lidia Tripiccione 9 The vanishing brains of the Soviet Pantheon and the vexing question of the materiality of Soviet subjects — Jamie Phillips 10 Reflection: Wordy things, thingly signs, and other points of transfer — Serguei Alex. Oushakine PART III: THINGS IN TIME 11 A building containing the universe: between heritage and atheism in late Soviet Tashkent — Mollie Arbuthnot 12 Things of life in times of extremes: survival materialities during the Soviet famines in Ukraine — Iryna Skubii 13 How did material culture matter in the Khrushchev-era USSR? Everyday aesthetics and the socialist culture of things — Susan E. Reid 14 Reprocessing and resurfacing reality: reworking the everyday and the avant-garde in the artistic laboratory of Irina Nakhova — Gabriella A. Ferrari 15 Reflection: One does not kiss a monument of ancient art: Russian Orthodox icons and the abducted materiality of modernity — Alexey Golubev Select bibliography -- .

Reviews

‘This important volume traces the many ways in which materiality shaped Soviet subjectivities, structured social meaning, and conditioned historical processes. In so doing, the collection forcefully demonstrates the value of taking the mutually-constitutive relationship between humans and objects seriously. Indeed, the individual contributions show this approach to be especially productive at the newest frontiers of Soviet studies, especially histories of emotions, time and memory studies, and sensory and corporeal histories. Provocatively, the book also suggests that the Soviet Union’s own schools of materialist thought might retain contemporary relevance as an alternative tradition of thinking about materiality. A major contribution in its own right, Soviet materialities is also a lodestar for future research.’ —Antony Kalashnikov, University of Waterloo, editor of Time and Material Culture: Rethinking Soviet Temporalities and author of Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time ‘Soviet materialities is that rare thing in an edited volume: a tightly conceived polyphony where rich dialogues emerge between and across essays. In its capacious attention to materials, it reveals, recuperates and interrogates specifically Soviet understandings of the interaction between human and object worlds. It marks an important reorientation of our scholarly field.’ —Emma Widdis, University of Cambridge, Professor of Slavonic Studies, Author of Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling, and the Soviet Subject ‘Soviet materialities is much more than an indispensable resource for those seeking new research informed by recent writing on material culture in an area where such theories were foreshadowed (and subsequently overlooked). The essays anthologized here reveal a wholly revitalized sphere of inquiry into the creative and lived experiences that shaped the former Soviet space. They span a remarkable range of approaches, periods, and, indeed, materialities, all stemming from the proposition that a renewed focus on the particularities of human engagement with the material world (whether artistic, domestic, or sacred) is urgently needed in our own time. Authored by a diverse group of scholars, some established, many newly published in literary, anthropological, and art historical disciplines, these texts accomplish an extraordinary feat given the challenges of original research we all encounter; they should succeed in conveying the vibrancy of our field to readers in many disciplines, and appeal as well to those for whom the strange may now become both more compelling and familiar.’ —Jane A. Sharp, Rutgers University, Research Curator, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union at the Zimmerli Museum, author of Russian Modernism between East and West: Natal’ia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-Garde, 1905-14 -- .

Author Information

Mollie Arbuthnot is Assistant Professor of History at Nazarbayev University. Christianna Bonin is Assistant Professor of Art History and Theory at American University of Sharjah. Gabriella A. Ferrari is an independent scholar of Russian and Soviet visual culture.

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