1st Edition
Time and Material Culture Rethinking Soviet Temporalities
This edited volume offers an original exploration into the ways in which Soviet culture and experience of time were unique, examining the temporalities expressed in the world of socialist things: from the objects of everyday life to urban architecture.
Grounding the analysis of Soviet temporalities in their material incarnations not only lends concreteness to discussions of temporal culture, but also draws out ways in which the specificities of Soviet things—and their planning, design, manufacture, and consumption—mediated and produced particular ways of experiencing, perceiving, and representing time. As such, Time and Material Culture turns a new page in the study of the temporal and material culture of Soviet socialism and, in doing so, contributes to broader debates on the changing experiences of time in the global twentieth century. The book integrates interdisciplinary perspectives as well as regional approaches sensitive to the multinational nature of the Soviet project.
Time and Material Culture will be useful to academics, upper-level undergraduates, and graduate students interested in twentieth-century cultures of time.
Introduction: Soviet Temporal and Material Cultures in Dialogue
Julie Deschepper, Antony Kalashnikov, Federica Rossi
Part 1: Alternatives, Dissonances, and Disjunctions
1. Chronopolitics: Restoring “Backward” Spaces to Modern Time in Soviet Baku after WWII
Heather de Haan
2. Soviet Industrial Time and Nonscalable Temporalities: Telling Time with Hydraulic Seas
Nastia Volynova
3. The Golden Age of Soviet Heritage: An Alternative Presentism?
Julie Deschepper
4. Conflicting Temporalities of Socialist Urbanity: Modernisation vis-à-vis Architectural Heritage in the Development of Minsk
Nelly Bekus
Part 2: Representations, Imaginations, and Narratives
5. Last Stop, Communism: Time as Space in Early Soviet Political Posters
Reed Johnson
6. From Survey to Inspiration: Accommodating Pre-Soviet Materiality in Soviet Lviv (1940s-1960s)
Sofia Dyak
7. Immortalising Yurts? The Temporalities of Nomadic Architecture in Stalinist Central Asia
Federico Marcomini
8. Hybrid Temporality Unveiled: Bridging People and State in the Late Soviet Union Through the Amateur Filmmaking Kit
Ekaterina Knoblauch
Part 3: Bodies, Experiences, and Perceptions
9. Stitches in Time: Maiakovskii’s Overcoat and Temporal Self-Fashioning in the Soviet Union
James Rann
10. Poets’ “Hand” on Display: Soviet Literary Museums as Curators of Sacral Materiality
Olga Voronina
11. Socialist Time in Fashion: The Late Soviet Interpretation
Ekaterina Kulinicheva
Conclusion: The Matter of Time
Alexey Golubev
Biography
Julie Deschepper is an Assistant Professor in Heritage and Museum Studies at Utrecht University. She specialises in the material culture of socialism, with a focus on Soviet monumental heritage in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Antony Kalashnikov is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo. He works on Soviet understandings of futurity. His monograph, Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time, came out in 2023.
Federica Rossi is an Assistant Professor in the History of Architecture at Iuav University of Venice, and a research associate at Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz and Università della Svizzera Italiana. She works on Russian and Soviet art, architecture and culture.
