Russia's Youth and Its Culture: A Nation's Constructors and Constructed

Since the political whirlwinds of the mid-1980s and the fall of communism in 1991, Russia has undergone dramatic social change, much of which has escaped the attention of Western media. In her new book, Hilary Pilkington applies the methods of cultural studies research to the study of Russian youth. She does this by `deconstructing' the social discourses within which Russian youth has been constructed and by providing an alternative reading of youth cultural activity, based on an ethnographic study of Moscow youth culture at the end of the 1980s. The book also charts the passage of western youth cultural studies in the twentieth century and suggests some new ways forward in the light of the Russian experience. Hilary Pilkington traces the cultural themes of youth culture in the Anglo-American tradition and within the Soviet Union, before examining the impact of perestroika on the media and its ramifications for the discussion of youth. The book ends with a study of young people in Moscow and youth cultural groups; the product of field work and interviews in the city.

Politics & Social Sciences

Hilary Pilkington

Social Sciences

Routledge

The author should not disappear into her own work, says Christa Wolf, but should stand up and be counted. In this series of interviews and conversations spanning more than a decade, Christ Wolf does precisely that. Here, one of the greatest contemporary novelists discusses the origins of an inspirations for her best known works. Often taking as her starting point events from the past, her novels, she explains, remain fictions of the present, whether her concern is to reassess the experiences of growing up in Nazi Germany, as in A Model Childhood, or to attempt to trace the roots of the contradictions in which our civilisation is now trapped, as in Cassandra. These conversations, however, take her far beyond the purely literary. She talks openly about what it means to be both a writer and a woman in East Germany today, and concludes that literature is no longer territorially defined. We are not so much divided by boundaries between East and West as united in our common experience of highly organized patriarchal society, she says, which has brought us to ‘the verge of annihilation’. It is the author’s voice, according to Christa Wolf, which provides ‘the fourth dimension’ of modern prose. In these pages her own voice emerges more loudly and clearly than ever.

The Fourth Dimension: Interview With Christa Wolf

Literature & Fiction

Karin McPherson

christa-wolf

Essays & Correspondence

Verso

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Books by Hilary Pilkington