Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon

Helena Goscilo is Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.

• Introduction 1. Russia's Ultimate Celebrity: VVP as VIP Objet d’artHelena Goscilo 2. A Personality Cult for the Postmodern Age: Reading Vladimir Putin’s Public Persona Julie A. Cassiday and Emily D. Johnson 3. Putin as the Father of the Nation: His Family and Other Animals Tatiana Mikhailova 4. Putin’s Language Michael Gorham 5. The Discourse of a Spectacle at the End of the Presidential Term Lara Ryazanova-Clarke 6. Putin in Russian Fiction Andrei Rogatchevski 7. Post-Soviet Self-Fashioning and the Politics of Representation Brian James Baer 8. Putin’s Performance of Masculinity: the Action Hero and Macho Sex-Object Helena Goscilo

'The book’s visual elements combine to show how Putin’s ‘comics-cum-Hollywood-action-film image’ (p. 5) is both constructed and deconstructed in Russia today. The overall impression is that there is not a single area of life in Russia on which Putin has not left his mark. It may well be true that, as Goscilo remarks on her chapter of the man’s particular type of machismo, ‘the mythology elaborated to showcase Putin’s public persona of singular heroic masculinity is so hyperbolic as to verge on parody’ (p. 200). Nevertheless, for all its vacuity and ridiculousness, the Putin ‘brand’ is incontestably ubiquitous. [...] Goscilo and her contributors skilfully deconstruct the cult of personality on which that power rests.' – Graham H. Roberts, Université, Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, Reviewed for Slavonica Review 19.1, pp. 79-81'Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon contains eight essays treating Putin’s cult of personality, his language, his public performance, and image, and the role these play in crafting Putin as a powerful symbol of the post-soviet Russian nation. What unites all these essays is Putin as spectacle where, wrote Guy Debord, “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation. . . .The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification.” Putin as spectacle vividly captures Debord’s thesis.' - Sean Guillory, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pittsburgh, councilforeuropeanstudies.org