Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780810129467)

Winner, 2014 AWSS Best Book in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Women's Studies

In Russian culture, the archetypal mother is noble and self-sacrificing. In Women with a Thirst for Destruction, however, Jenny Kaminer shows how this image is destabilized during periods of dramatic rupture in Russian society, examining in detail the aftermath of three key moments in the country's history: the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the fall of the Communist regime in 1991. She explores works both familiar and relatively unexamined: Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Golovlev Family, Fyodor Gladkov's Cement, and Liudmila Petrushevskaia's The Time: Night, as well as a late Soviet film (Vyacheslav Krishtofovich's Adam's Rib, 1990) and media coverage of the Chechen conflict. Kaminer's book speaks broadly to the mutability of seemingly established cultural norms in the face of political and social upheaval.

Author: Jenny Kaminer
ISBN-10: 0810129469
ISBN-13: 9780810129467
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Language: English
Published: 02/28/2014
Pages: 208
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.80d