Energy Culture

This volume investigates energy as a shaping force in Russian and Soviet literature, visual culture, and social practice. Chronologically arranged chapters explain how nineteenth-century ideas about energy informed realist novels and paintings; how the poetics of energy defined pre-Revolutionary and Stalinist utopianism; and how fossil fuels, electricity, and nuclear fission generated distinct aesthetic features in Imperial Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet literature, cinema, and landscape. The volume’s concentration on Russia responds to a clear need to understand the role the country plays in social, political, and economic processes endangering life on Earth today. The cultural dimension of Russia’s efforts at energy dominance deserves increased scholarly attention not only in its own right, but also because it directly affects global energy policy. As the contributors to this volume argue, the nationally inflected cultural myths that underlie human engagements with energy have been highly consequential in the Anthropocene. Jillian Porter is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. She is the author of Economies of Feeling: Russian Literature under Nicholas I (2017) and has published essays on money, commodities, and the queue in Russian and Soviet literature and cinema. Maya Vinokour is Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, USA. She studies Stalinist labor culture, late-Soviet science fiction, and post-Soviet media.