This dissertation analyzes the works of Yiddish and Hebrew writer Isaac Leib Peretz (1852-1915) during the 1890's. It criticaly engages with the entire range of Peretz's literary output during this period in both languages. It argues that Peretz functioned as a literary agent of the Jewish working class in Eastern Europe which was an ethnic-class fraction that was represented politically by the emerging Jewish Socialist Bund. During this period, Peretz's Yiddish-centric ideology emerged alongside his development as a writer of prose as well as of poetry. Thus he evolved from being a social realist, naturalist, and romantic bilingual politically radical writer into becoming a predominantly Yiddish writer of symbolist drama, folk-tales, and neo-romantic Hasidic stories and poetry during the 20th century. This thesis refutes the long-standing convention in Peretz-scholarship that his interest in new literary styles coinsided with a rejection of revolutionary politics; rather it reflected his ongoing search for new ways of expressing his radicalism.

This dissertation is about holes. It begins by analyzing the proverbial “hole in the fence” at late-Soviet enterprises: the way that workers pragmatically employed the planned economy's distribution rules by actions that were both morally commendable and questionably legal. It then analyzes the omission of this hole in perestroika economic analysis, which devoted surprisingly little attention to enterprises' central role in providing welfare and exerting social control, or to employees' pragmatic employment of the enterprises' rules. This analytic hole is compounded by a historiographic one: by the omission of the post-1956 omission of Stalin's name from public mention. Framing the perestroika reforms against “Stalinism,” perestroika-era texts typically trace the start of de-Stalinization to Khrushchev's “Cult of Personality” speech, after which Stalin's name disappeared from textbooks; rather than to the post-1953 reforms that fundamentally restructured labor, economic and punitive institutions to create characteristically late-Soviet methods of retaining and motivating labor: including the widespread disciplinary lenience that allowed workers to pragmatically employ enterprise rules. Precluded by this historiography from seeing how late-Soviet institutions had evolved in the post-Stalin absence of forced labor laws and how they practically functioned, popular and expert analysis instead tended to analyze citizens' relationships to the state in subjective terms: as a question of stagnant mindsets and loss of faith. Defined by its non-complicit denouncement of a retrospectively posited “Stalinist” state, the subject position taken by this analysis precluded speakers from seeing the presence behind all these holes: from seeing how they had practically constructed themselves and the late-Soviet system by pursuing their own economic, social and political goals through its institutions. The perestroika reform laws that were justified by this analysis intended to “speed up” society by intervening in workers' and citizens' feelings of ownership and responsibility. But, lacking a practical understanding of how late-Soviet institutions functioned, they instead quickly crashed the economy.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Iowa, 2007. / Thesis supervisors: Florence E. Babb, Rudolf Colloredo-Mansfield. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 252-267).

The history of the Cold War has rarely been looked at through the eyes of the smaller powers, especially ones in the Balkans. Works have also often ignored the actual workings of the international socialist market, and the possibilities it created for some of these small countries. The conventional wisdom has also prevailed that the Eastern Bloc was irreversably lagging technologically, and its societies had failed to enter the information age after the 1970s, one among a myriad of reasons for the failure of socialism. Using the prism of a commodity history of the Bulgarian computer and an ethnography of the professional class that built it and worked with it, this dissertation argues that such narratives obscure the role of small states and the importance of technology to the socialist project. The backward Bulgarian economy exploited the international socialist division of labour and COMECON’s mechanisms to set itself up as the “Silicon Valley” of the Eastern Bloc, garnering huge profits for the economy. To do so, it did not hue a politically maverick road but exploited its political orthodoxy and Soviet alliance to the full, securing huge markets. Importantly, this work also shows that the state facilitated massive transfers of knowledge and technology through both legal and illicit means, using its state security and economic organisations to look to the West. This made the Iron Curtain much more porous for a growing cadre of technical intellectuals who were trusted by the regime in order to create the golden exports of the country. This transfer and mobility helped create an internationally plugged-in and fluent class of engineers and managers, at odds with most of the rest of the economy. At the same time, the Global South became an important area of exchange where these specialists competed with both nascent protectionist regimes and international firms. Using India as a case study, this dissertation shows how Bulgarian met the First World on the grounds of the Third and learned to market, negotiate, advertise, and service customers – a skillset that was then applied to its socialist dealings. Finally, the dissertation examines the domestic impact of such policies. The regime wished to use cybernetics and computing to solve the problems of its lagging economic growth, as well as usher in communism. It introduced both the widespread discourse of technological revolutions to its population, and robots and automation to some of its factories. This created both anxieties and hopes among workers, as well as vibrant philosophical debates about the future roles of humans in the information society, among both technical and humanistic intellectuals. Ultimately, however, the economic inefficiency undermined the promise and this failure was utilised by some technical managers to call for reforms, playing a hand in the end of the regime. They managed to negotiate the transfer to capitalism better than most, utilising their financial and business links, while thousands of engineers also found a better life than the vast majority of Bulgarian workers, through emigration or their possession of cutting edge skills. Using Bulgarian, Russian, Indian archives as well as interviews with living actors, the dissertation thus intervenes in both the view of the Iron Curtain as an impenetrable barrier for ideas, and 1989 as a convenient end point for communism’s legacies. It shows both the creation of new professional classes and how they were plugged into global developments, arguing that some people in the socialist bloc did enter the information age, and it is by paying attention to their actions and interests that we can get a better understanding of the developments of late socialism and its end.

"Afterlife of Empire" explores Ottoman cultural, social, and political continuities in Bosnia Herzegovina during the Habsburg administration (1878-1914). The research focuses on the enduring influence of the Ottoman Empire - an influence perpetuated both by the efforts of the Ottoman imperial state, and by the former subjects in Bosnia Herzegovina itself to explain the lingering aftereffects of the Ottoman Empire in the province. At the core of this dissertation is the argument that the Ottoman subjects and the former territories did not stop being Ottoman in any significant sense immediately after the separation from the empire, and that the break with the empire was not that of rupture, but characterized by enduring features of the empire that evolved to respond to diplomatic and strategic interests in the region. A shift from the common inclination to analyze the Habsburg period as the introduction of modernity, and a focus, not on the national/ethnic framework constructed around identity, but on the overlapping, multiple loyalties in this study convey a more accurate representation of the period and an assessment of what legitimacy and sovereignty meant in this region. By drawing on Ottoman and Bosnian archival sources in focusing on Bosnia's overlapping imperial, regional, religious, linguistic, and cultural frameworks, this dissertation demonstrates the importance of considering the Ottoman context after its formal departure, and the significance of incorporating Islamic intellectual history in understanding the past and present of Bosnia Herzegovina and Southeastern Europe in general.

At the height of his power in 1923, the head of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU), Alexander Stamboliiski, summed up the significance of his politics for European history in the following way: "Today there are only two interesting social experiments: the experiment of Lenin and my own." Taking the aspirations reflected in the quotation above seriously and rescuing the agrarian project from the enormous condescension of posterity is the foundation of this dissertation. Briefly, it is about unpacking and restoring the significance of the Golden Age of the European Peasantry between the two world wars by focusing on the paradigmatic cases of Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. The dissertation proposes a novel synoptic approach with regards to interwar agrarianism as a counterpoint to ideology driven classifications or structuralist synthesis. Its thematic chapters alternate between strategic probes of evocative micro histories and broader theoretically informed overviews in order to illustrate and clarify the analytical frame. The most radical expression of interwar agrarianism, that of Bulgaria, and the man responsible for it, Alexander Stamboliiski, serve as the center of this dissertation. The juxtaposition of this center to the development of agrarianism in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as to various oppositional formations such as the Communist International Peasant Union allows this dissertation to overcome the national parochialism that has contributed to the sidelining of the study of agrarianism. The innovative structure of the dissertation is above all a demonstration of the rich possibilities still open to researchers in this field to reinsert the study of agrarianism into contemporary theoretical debates and developments in the historiography. The dissertation explicitly engages agrarianism with the theoretical literature on nationalism, corruption, the subaltern, as well as makes possible the connection to the problematics of modernity, politics as systemic change, transnational and global history.

This dissertation examines the development of Russian literature in the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union as a focused study in how literature adjusts to institutional failure. It investigates how cultural forms reproduce themselves and how literature continues to forge meaningful symbolic connections with its audiences, traditions, and the broader culture. I begin when Soviet state prizes, publishers, and organizations like the Writers Union could no longer provide paths to literary prominence in the early 1990s and a booming book market and a privatized prestige economy stepped into the vacuum. At this time, post-Soviet Russian authors faced a mixed blessing: freedom from censorship alongside a disorienting array of new publishers, prizes, and critical outlets, joined later by online and social media. In this new environment, personal success became an important structural value for authors and for literary works. The literary process was driven, in large part, by authors who found innovative solutions to immediate problems along their pathways to success. In search of readers, recognition, and aesthetic innovation, the authors in this dissertation transformed and even created the institutional and economic frameworks for post-Soviet Russian literature’s development, while at the same time developing new cultural forms capable of connecting with audiences in intimate and meaningful ways. The sum effect of their individual solutions to discrete problems along their own paths to success was a profound shift in the literary field, the creation and entrenchment of a new system of cultural production, distribution and consumption based on capitalist principles—the system I call “cultural capitalism.” This dissertation shows how cultural capitalism developed out of the institutional collapse of the Soviet cultural system. While many studies have analyzed the cultural field’s genesis, its social role, and internal mechanisms, few have considered the fate of literature or culture at times of institutional failure, and fewer still have focused on possible mechanisms of recovery. Studies of contemporary Russian literature, on the other hand, have often relied on master tropes, frequently borrowed from Western literary theory. While this research constitutes an important contribution, it fails to address the central question of how literature has been affected by social upheaval and institutional failure. My project addresses this gap by modeling cultural capitalism as a literary system in which the drive for success is pervasive, but the very meaning of “success” can be defined differently by different authors. The term cultural capitalism builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital, but imagines that resource as part of a dynamic system of cultural exchange, while my understanding of success expands on Boris Dubin’s work on the topic. Finally, building on Formalist investigations of “literary evolution” and the “literary everyday,” as well as contemporary Russian sociological studies, I provide a theoretical model that connects the structures of the post-Soviet literary environment to new forms of verbal art. Through interviews, close readings, and secondary research, I show how four prominent authors—Boris Akunin, Olga Slavnikova, Aleksei Ivanov, and Vera Polozkova—have developed idiosyncratic visions of success. I then demonstrate how each author’s particular patterns of ambitions correlate with the literary, economic, and institutional innovations that define their artistic works, careers, and positions in the literary field. By triangulating authors’ visions of success, their navigations of the literary field, and their innovative verbal art, I map out the trajectories of literature as both an institution and as an art form across the transition from the Soviet to the post-Soviet era.

I examine the origins of the anti-totalitarian collective memory pervading Central and Eastern Europe by tracking the genesis and development of the region’s ubiquitous and state-sponsored memory institutes. I deploy field analysis, prosopography and in-depth interviews to reveal how these hybrid institutes generate a potent anti-communist symbolic repertoire by overseeing alliances and exchanges across political, historiographic and Eurocratic fields. Memory institutes ensure this hegemony fundamentally via two mechanisms: The scientific validation of their activities by way of scholarly co-optation, and its regional legitimation through incursions into European arenas. I conclude that memory institutes are ultimately a key element of post-communist political competition, responsible for creating a durable symbolic advantage for the right’s conservative identity politics.

The present work tells the story of the rise and fall of a pan-Balkan discourse from the mid-1920s to the eve of the Second World War through an examination of the intellectual output of southeast European diplomat-littérateurs—a range of intellectuals and literati who functioned as conduits between the realms of culture and politics—during the years of dislocation and turmoil following the Great War. It traces the emergence of transnational networks that coalesced around interwar pan-Balkanism, or the wide-ranging and diffuse movement that aimed to forge a union out of Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece and Turkey, as well as to build substantive intellectual and cultural links among these states. Beginning with the Locarno treaties and the attendant optimism for a united Europe, the Universal Peace Congress of 1929 in Athens, followed by an evaluation of the consecutive Balkan conferences of the early 1930s alongside the work of its varied proponents, this dissertation illustrates how the stigmatized regional moniker, “the Balkans,” was, in fact, re-inscribed and endowed with a new, positively-inflected meaning in the course of efforts to bring about a rapprochement. Moving beyond the scope of earlier scholarship that pitted the Balkans against the West, instead this work demonstrates the interconnectedness of Balkan and European intellectual networks, as well as local actors’ overwhelming subscription to the tenets of cultural internationalism. This work examines Greek, Yugoslav and Albanian foreign policy, geopolitical agendas, popular press as well as literature in order to demonstrate that alternatives to the nation-state as a method of state-building and intellectual organization were, in fact, under consideration. Ultimately, this dissertation depicts intellectual life in the Balkans as it unfolds over the course of the interwar decades and explains why the Balkan idea reemerged during this critical interlude.

Vocal polyphonic music, as one of Georgia’s primary cultural exports that has been gaining popularity in the world, plays a big part in the effort of creating a marketable Georgian identity – an effort tied to the Georgian state’s desire to join the EU and get away from its Soviet past. Whether state-sponsored or private, a number of institutions have risen to prominence in recent years, all proclaiming to be dedicated to the preservation and popularization of Georgian folklore. While their contribution to these missions is extensive, their policies and practices often carry an eerie resemblance to the Soviet attempts at selective promotion of indigenous cultures. By the very nature of their structure, these institutions impose a particular idea of power and hierarchy: wherein a few select people control the distribution of finances, information, and other resources, performers adhere to dress codes, and ensembles have centralized leadership. My argument in this work is that this idea of power and hierarchy is at odds with the practice of Georgian polyphonic singing, which involves (usually) three distinct voices coming together, without designating a “chief” or “main” one among them. Rather, the singers trade off taking the lead, with endless opportunities for melodic and textual improvisation, and the songs in question are not possible if all the voices are not present. Through a close analysis of ethnographic data from the provinces of Guria and Svaneti in Western Georgia, this project explores how power, preservation, and death — both semiotic and literal — coincide, intersect, and diverge in the Georgian folk singing communities. I approach the tradition as a dynamic habit, with its practitioners as participants in a continuous process, which can only die if performance reaches the “perfect” form, so often exulted by the very institutions that vow to keep it alive. My discussion of the singing practice in this dissertation poses broader questions within the disciplines of anthropology and ethnomusicology, such as: how does the growing popularity of a musical practice shape the worldwide discourse and local policies around it? What happens when rigid institutional power structures are imposed onto a tradition that is pre-disposed against them? And what options and choices do the practitioners of this tradition have when it comes to maintaining their commitment to it?