Razvlekatelnaia kultura Rossii XVIII-XIX vv.: ocherki istorii i teorii, and : Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710-2000, and: Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (review)

Fun, leisure, and entertainment do not usually spring to mind when one thinks about Russian history. "Serious issues" instead have until recently dominated much of the historical research— the social question, crime, wars, and revolutions, to name just a few. As far as the Russian people were concerned, they mostly appeared in their work dress or corporate outfit, as peasants, soldiers, workers, priests, bureaucrats, merchants, and nobles.¹ In other words, their historical relevance (and, for that matter, their historiographical treatment) was largely defined by their professional activities or legal and social status. Doing nothing, simply enjoying oneself and having fun, did not weigh much on the historical scales.

Even so, as the three books under review suggest, leisure and entertainment culture are indeed historically relevant. Their study provides unique access to people's aspirations and dreams as well as to their forms of sociability and their attempts at self-fulfillment and respectability. More specifically, it reveals changes in values, styles, behavior, cultural mythmaking, and everyday life (byt), which are difficult to gauge through other approaches. This is not to say that the three books employ one and the same methodology. Indeed, they are quite different in the way they treat their material, and they only rarely overlap in actual subject matter. McReynolds presents a colorful, wide-ranging, and fascinating picture of late imperial entertainment genres and leisure activities, many of which could easily be the topics of individual books. Lovell, in turn, focuses with admirable sophistication and impressive knowledge on just one— albeit one of the classical— institutions of Russian cultural, social, and, last but not least, economic life, the dacha. The volume edited by Dukov, finally, contains 23 articles, all quite unrelated and many of them rather empirical. It nevertheless represents a treasure trove for cultural practices, social rituals, and behavior.

Expanding on the growing scholarship on Russian popular and mass cultures,² including some of her own work, Louise McReynolds in her new book "step[s] outside the traditional historiographical narrative and search[es] for Russia's middle classes as they identified themselves" (302). She does so by concentrating on how people played rather than worked and how they, in the process, imagined and realized themselves. The emergence of a middle class in the second half of the 19th century is thus understood not just as a change of political and economic structures, but rather as a transformation of attitudes and consciousness. By engaging in certain kinds of leisure-time activities, Russians shaped their sense of self and gave meaning to a phenomenon that historians of Russia have had great difficulties in defining, interpreting, and quantifying: the middle class.

Mass culture serves as a window on this new, pluralist, and dynamic society. It was as modern as other activities associated with the middle classes. It drew on technological progress, urbanization, a capitalist economy, and growing transport and communication facilities. It was above all a commercialized culture, following business principles and shaping the consumption habits of increasing numbers of people. As McReynolds points out repeatedly, this commercialization of culture was in itself highly political, since it affected not just individual consumers but also their social interactions. It entailed a reconceptualization of public space and free time and thus indirectly promoted increased participation in public life. It also was on a collision course with political conservatism and with the cultural elitism of intelligentsia Kulturträger. The...