Melodramatic Imagination in Russian Culture

Marina Balina is a professor of Russian Studies at Illinois Wesleyan University and holds the Isaac Funk professorship.

• Introduction: Rethinking Russia's Melodramatic CultureDaisuke AdachiPart I: Melodramatic Ethics: Empathy, Suffering, and Salvation1. Aristocracy, Victimhood, and the Demands of Justice in Lev Tolstoy's Kholstomer Vadim Shneyder2. Melodrama, Young Adults, and the Pedagogy of Empathy in Russian Coming–of-Age LiteratureMarina Balina3. The Postmodernist "Moral Occult": Liudmila Petrushevskaya and Linor GoralikMark LipovetskyPart II: Melodramatic Affect or the Melo/Drama of Emotions4. Melodramatic Heroines in Pre-revolutionary Russian Cinema Sawako Ogawa5. Nervous People: Trauma and Aesthetic Hysteria in the Late Stalinist MelodramaAnna Toropova6. Melodramatic Things and Bodies of Memory in Soviet Films about Individual Loss and Collective TraumaOksana Bulgakowa7. Vocal Supplements: How Late Soviet Melodrama Got Its Melos BackSerguei A. OushakinePart III: Melodramatizing Russia's Politics: Past and Present8. The Melodramatic Imagination and Russian Prose of the 1830sMaria Mayofis9. Transforming Political Ideals into Melodrama: Kollontai's The Workers' Opposition and A Great Love Satoko Kitai10. The Birth of Melodrama from the Spirit of the Sublime in Socialist RealismEvgeny Dobrenko11. Political and Personal Melodrama in Contemporary Russian-Language Poetry Ilya KukulinPart IV: Melodrama and Subjectivity in Contemporary Media12. Staying Alive in Neoliberal Russia: Gender and Agency in An Ordinary Woman Elena Prokhorova and Alexander Prokhorov13. Left Melodrama on YouTube: Shaping the Personal as the Political on Katerina Gordeeva's ShowLarissa Rudova14. Reinventing Ordinary Life: Melodramatic Narratives in the Russian Social Network VkontakteIrina Prus