Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era

by Louise McReynolds

An athlete becomes a movie star; a waiter rises to manage a chain of nightclubs; a movie scenarist takes to writing restaurant reviews. Intrepid women hunt bears, drive in automobile races, and fly, first in balloons and then in airplanes. Sensational crimes jump from city streets onto the screen almost before the pistols have had a chance to cool. Paris in the Twenties? Fitzgerald's New York? Early Hollywood? No, tsarist Russia in the last decades before the Revolution. In Russia at Play , Louise McReynolds recreates a vibrant, rapidly changing culture in rich detail. Her account encompasses the "legitimate" stage, vaudeville, nightclubs, restaurants, sports, tourism, and the silent movie industry. McReynolds reveals a pluralist and dynamic society, and shows how the new icons of mass culture affected the subsequent gendering of identities. The rapid industrialization and urbanization of the late tsarist period spawned dramatic social changes―an urban middle class and a voracious consumer culture demanded new forms of entertainment. The result was the rapid incursion of commercial values into the arts and the athletic field and unprecedented degrees of social interaction in the new nightclubs, vaudeville houses, and cheap movie houses. Traditional rules of social conduct shifted to greater self-fulfillment and self-expression, values associated with the individualism and consumerism of liberal capitalism. Leisure-time activities, McReynolds finds, allowed Russians who partook of them to recreate themselves, to develop a modern identity that allowed for different senses of the self depending on the circumstances. The society that spawned these impulses would disappear in Russia for decades under the combined blows of revolution, civil war, and collectivization, but questions of personal identity are again high on the agenda as Russia makes the transition from a collectivist society to one in which the dominant ethos remains undefined.

Genres: Russia, History, Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

First published November 26, 2002

Reviews

[Kerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a nice book! Although academic in tone, the subject matter is so fun that the book remains engaging. McReynolds maintains an awareness about gender, performance, and roles throughout the book, which gives it a "subplot" worth paying attention to.

I especially like the foray into the burgeoning tourism industry and what that meant for the Russians discovering affordable tourism, what it meant for those places catering to them, and the shifting perceptions/boundaries of what is considered "Eastern Europe."

The research into Maria Savina and her rise to fame and cultivation of an "ideal" portrayal of womanhood while she clung to the independence and social freedoms being a top-earning actor gave her is fascinating. Glad to have been introduced to this "character" in Russian theater history.

[Alenka of Bohemia · Rating 3 out of 5]

While far from uninteresting, this is more of a thesis than a book, if you know what I mean. Touching on the fascinating topic of how the Russians pre 1917 spent their free time and how entertainment culture was shaped (and shaped the public in response), it is very dry with run-on sentences. I would also recommend having a thesaurus nearby.

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is an amazing book.. super interdisciplinary and very engaging... excellent work of russian cultural history, and very racy at points! YAY!