Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood

<p><em>Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood</em> is a collection of multidisciplinary scholarly essays on childhood experience. The volume offers new critical approaches to Russian and Soviet childhood at the intersection of philosophy literary criticism film/visual studies and history. Pedagogical ideas and practices and the ideological and political underpinnings of the experience of growing up in pre-revolutionary Russia the Soviet Union and Putin’s contemporary Russia are central venues of analysis. Toward the goal of constructing the multimedial childhood text the contributors tackle issues of happiness and trauma associated with childhood and foreground its fluidity and instability in the Russian context. The volume further examines practices of reading childhood: as nostalgic text documentary evidence and historic mythology. Considering Russian childhood as historical documentation or fictional narrative as an object of material culture and as embodied in different media (periodicals visual culture and cinema) the volume intends to both problematize but also elucidate the relationship between childhood history and various modes of narrativity.</p>