Alexander Prokhorov

My dissertation argues that while Thaw cultural producers believed that they had abandoned Stalinist cultural practices, their works continued to generate, in revised form, the major tropes of Stalinist culture: the positive hero, and family and war tropes. Although the cultural Thaw of the 1950s and 60s embraced new values, it merely reworked Stalinist artistic practices. On the basis of literary and cinematic texts, I examine how these two media reinstantiated the fundamental tropes of Russo-Soviet culture.In the first two chapters, I discuss approaches to Thaw literature and film in Western and Soviet scholarship, and my methodology, which is best defined as cultural semiotics. Chapter Three discusses the instantiations of the positive hero in Thaw literature and film. As case studies I adduce Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1957) and Grigorii Kozintsev's film adaptation of Hamlet (1964). The fourth chapter examines how Thaw culture redefines the family and war tropes i...

Social satire and fantasy films were an implicit affront to Soviet convention. Concurrently, these genres have always given more freedom to filmmakers vis-à-vis censorship. In the late sixties, Soviet filmmakers devised a subversive means to reevaluate the social norms of late Soviet culture, particularly during the Stagnation era: they used doubling—the hero–antihero duo—to demonstrate the discrepancy between positive and negative, between the proclaimed norm and its antithesis. This chapter examines Pavel Arsenov’s King Stag (Korol’ olen’ 1969), Nadezhda Kosheverova’s Shadow (Ten’ 1971), Leonid Gaidai’s Ivan Vasil’evich: Back to the Future (Ivan Vasil’evich meniaet professiiu 1973), and Aleksandr Seryi’s Gentlemen of Fortune (Dzhentl’meny udachi 1971) and Quid Pro Quo (Ty – mne, ia – tebe 1976). If earlier films had portrayed characters in a more straightforward manner, with such characters possessing either immutable negative or positive attributes, these later films would center around a hero–antihero pairing, neither of whom were entirely good nor bad. In these films, identity proves capable of change; character is not restricted to a single, constant state.

Abstract This article compares and contrasts the representation of the child and adolescent hero in films of the Thaw (1956–64). It argues that, while Thaw films seemed to represent a new value system that placed the individual in the centre, numerous films in the 1950s and 1960s ...

... with clever use of the new sound medium; The Beginning is praised for a virtuoso performance by the actress Inna Churikova; while the ... trope of the romantic threesome to tell the story of 'enemy of the people' Pavel Kuganov's duplicitous seduction of upright Party member Anna. ...

In her study of gender and agency in American film and television, Kathleen Rowe argues that film "melodrama and comedy are linked by common ideologies that limit the plots available for narrative representations of female desire" (1995, 14). In melodrama, Rowe writes, the female protagonist can gain temporary agency only via suffering and self-sacrifice. In romantic comedy, the heroine exercises greater control over the narrative, but is eventually tamed by the male lead. Both classical Hollywood genres reassert patriarchal status quo. In contrast to these genres, the female-centered situation comedy, such as I Love Lucy, is a postmodern open-ended genre that spoofs "the tropes of masculinity and patriotism" and threatens the sanctity of social institutions (Rowe 1995, 53). Following Mikhail Bakhtin's study of Francois Rabelais and carnival in early modern Europe and Natalie Zemon Davis's analysis of popular culture and gender in early modern France, 1 Rowe contends that screen formats privileging the female comedian embody the genre memory of the unruly woman tradition and can be traced back to early modern European culture of carnival. Like the unruly woman of street carnival and Renaissance novel, female comedians disrupt ideological and narrative continuity of genres maintaining the patriarchal status quo. In our chapter we argue that the female comedian emerges in Soviet cinema but becomes a true visual icon in post-Soviet television. In particular, we focus on this character's ability to challenge the patriarchal powers that constrain female characters. We do not aspire to write an exhaustive history of the female comedian in Russian screen genres of laughter. Rather, we set out to investigate the growing role of such a character-whom, following Rowe's definition, we call "the spectacle-making unruly woman" (1995, 4)-in late socialist melodrama and the post-Soviet sitcom. Drawing on the works of Bakhtin and Davis, Rowe contends that "the topos of the unruly woman. .. reverberates whenever women disrupt the norms of femininity and the social hierarchy of male over female through excess and outrageousness" (1995, 31). The unruly "woman on top" creates disorder by attempting to dominate men. Her body is excessive and she refuses to control her physical and sexual appetites; she is loud; jokes; mocks men, and laughs at them. The unruly woman's behavior is often perceived by Un/Taming the Unruly Woman

dir. Dobroliubov, 1991). Phantom Holocaust is structured chronologically and thus provides the reader with an overall understanding of how the subject of the Holocaust was treated in Soviet cinema over time. However, its choice of chapter-long case studies often breaks up the coherent trajectory, and the privileging of some films over equally interesting others does not have a clear rationale. Overall, Phantom Holocaust is an important breakthrough in a newly developing area of scholarly interest, which paves a fresh path for future research.

In her study of gender and agency in American film and television, Kathleen Rowe argues that film "melodrama and comedy are linked by common ideologies that limit the plots available for narrative representations of female desire" (1995, 14). In melodrama, Rowe writes, the female protagonist can gain temporary agency only via suffering and self-sacrifice. In romantic comedy, the heroine exercises greater control over the narrative, but is eventually tamed by the male lead. Both classical Hollywood genres reassert patriarchal status quo. In contrast to these genres, the female-centered situation comedy, such as I Love Lucy, is a postmodern open-ended genre that spoofs "the tropes of masculinity and patriotism" and threatens the sanctity of social institutions (Rowe 1995, 53). Following Mikhail Bakhtin's study of Francois Rabelais and carnival in early modern Europe and Natalie Zemon Davis's analysis of popular culture and gender in early modern France, 1 Rowe contends that screen formats privileging the female comedian embody the genre memory of the unruly woman tradition and can be traced back to early modern European culture of carnival. Like the unruly woman of street carnival and Renaissance novel, female comedians disrupt ideological and narrative continuity of genres maintaining the patriarchal status quo. In our chapter we argue that the female comedian emerges in Soviet cinema but becomes a true visual icon in post-Soviet television. In particular, we focus on this character's ability to challenge the patriarchal powers that constrain female characters. We do not aspire to write an exhaustive history of the female comedian in Russian screen genres of laughter. Rather, we set out to investigate the growing role of such a character-whom, following Rowe's definition, we call "the spectacle-making unruly woman" (1995, 4)-in late socialist melodrama and the post-Soviet sitcom. Drawing on the works of Bakhtin and Davis, Rowe contends that "the topos of the unruly woman. .. reverberates whenever women disrupt the norms of femininity and the social hierarchy of male over female through excess and outrageousness" (1995, 31). The unruly "woman on top" creates disorder by attempting to dominate men. Her body is excessive and she refuses to control her physical and sexual appetites; she is loud; jokes; mocks men, and laughs at them. The unruly woman's behavior is often perceived by Un/Taming the Unruly Woman