Returning to some reading

McReynolds, Louisa, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Czarist Era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.

When I was in graduate school a prominent theme in the history courses I took had to do with leisure and culture. The book Cheap Amusements was assigned to me twice in two different courses. One of the best books which I have returned to recently was Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Czarist Era, a book that traces the presence of commercial culture in the late imperial period of Russia.

The author, Louise McReynolds, points out that the Russian middle classes have been studied to explain politics - - specifically why they were unable to establish political institutions and prevent revolution. She quotes Peter Sterns who advocated investigating "a shift in personality traits and not just a change in political and economic structure" (p.4). McReynolds identifies "five clearly defined leisure time activities . . .: theater, sports, tourism, nightlife, and motion pictures" (p.4).

The "politics implicit in commercialization and mass distribution is central to [her] analysis" pointing out that the "emerging middle classes became politicized by virtue of their habits of consumption" (p.4).

I was interested in my classes by the discussions students would have around the difference between "Mass culture" and "popular culture". Russia becomes in this book a fertile ground for exploring such concepts and others including "bourgeoisie," "middle class," "self fashioning," public/private space, "intelligentsia," and other phenomenon where "an athlete becomes a movie star; a waiter rises to manage a chain of nightclubs, a movie scenarist takes to writing restaurant reviews" (p.10).

Books like these fashioned after the model of Enrico Gramcsi prove endlessly fascinating. As McReynolds describes her five leisure areas a deeper understanding of the end of the czarist era emerges.