Performing Russia

Laura J. Olson is Assistant Professor of Russian at the University of Colarado, Boulder. She has been researching and performing Slavic folk music since 1987.

• Introduction 1. The Invention and Re-invention of Folk Music in Pre-Revolutionary Russia 2. A Unified National Style: Folklore Performance in the Soviet Context 3. The Origins of the Russian Folk Revival Movement 4. Revival and Identity after Socialism 5. Power and Ritual: Russian Nationalism and Representations of the Folk, Orthodoxy, Imperial Russia and the Cossackry 6. Performing Masculinity: Cossack Myth and Reality in Post-Soviet Revival Movements 7. The Village Revives 8. Making Memory: How Urban Intellectuals Re-invent Russian Village Traditions

'This book offers valuable insights into post-Soviet Russian society, culture, and grass-roots political developments.' - MLR, 102.1, 2007'Olsen has a talent for clear exposition and cogent summary, as she shows in her survey of the appropriation of folk song in the eighteenth century by the literate classes and the main trends in folk-song performance in the nineteenth.'- MLR, 102.1, 2007