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 in trench prose and film melodrama. As case studies I discuss Viktor Nekrasovs war novel In the Trenches of Stalingrad (1947) and Mikhail Kalatozovs melodrama Cranes Are Flying (1957). The fifth chapter treats the ironic reworkings of the major tropes in Soviet culture of the 1960s. My case studies consist of Vasilii Aksenov's novel Ticket to the Stars (1961) and El'dar Riazanov's film Beware of a Car (1966). Irony, as one of the major taboos of socialist realism, was absent during Stalinism and early Thaw culture but became an increasingly dominant mode of late Soviet aesthetics. The dissertation traces the evolution of Soviet cultural tropes in literature and film of the Thaw: from the project of redefining them to the project of distancing from them. While the majority of writers on the period argue the radical departure of Thaw producers from the Stalinist cultural practices, I argue for the understanding of the Thaw as the period sharing basic cultural tropes with Stalinism while their specific instantiations in various modes of cultural production became different due to the changes in cultural capital, technologies, and values.

My dissertation provides an analysis of the Soviet television mini-series released between the late 1960s and early 1980s, specifically the spy thriller, the police procedural, and the detective series. I argue that serialized production were an ideal form for the negotiation of the inherited models of individual and collective identity with the new cultural, social, and political values that came into play during the Brezhnev era. Chapter One provides an overview of Russian and Western studies of Soviet television and describes the methodology used in the three analytical chapters. I approach the three genres as variations of the socialist realist masterplot, which undergoes fragmentation and transformation in mini-series. Chapter Two discusses the spy thriller, which addresses the issue of inside vs. outside of the political system, revealing the absence of a stable meaning behind the category of the Soviet us. My case studies in this chapter are Evgenii Tashkovs His Highnesss Adjutant (1969) and Tat'iana Lioznovas Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973). Chapter Three analyzes the genre of police procedural. The institutional version of the genreThe Investigation Is Conducted by Experts (1971-89)--lays bare the absurdity of the Soviet economy, while The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed (Stanislav Govorukhin 1979) redefines police narrative as a populist story of idealized past. Chapter Four discusses detective mini-series. As case studies I use the Aniskin series of made-for-TV films (1968, 1974, 1978) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (Igor' Maslennikov 1979-86). These productions use temporal and spatial displacement to construct a protagonist, whose status of positive hero is entirely determined by the utopian nature of the community he represents. In late Soviet culture, modernist utopia turns into a stylized Victorian past, which above all values stability. Finally, Conclusion discusses the role of Brezhnev era productions on post-Soviet television. I argue that these series both fulfill a therapeutic function by establishing a link with the past culture and serve as models for the construction of a new Russian identity. I interpret Russian televisions privileging of the police procedural as the revival of Russians search for a communal, rather than an individual identity.

This is a study of the cultural significance and generic specificity of the Russo-Soviet joke (in Russian, anekdot [pl. anekdoty]). My work departs from previous analyses by locating the genre's quintessence not in its formal properties, thematic taxonomy, or structural evolution, but in the essential links and productive contradictions between the anekdot and other texts and genres of Russo-Soviet culture. The anekdot's defining intertextuality is prominent across a broad range of cycles, including those based on popular film and television narratives, political anekdoty, and other cycles that draw on more abstract discursive material. Central to my analysis is the genre's capacity for reflexivity in various senses, including generic self-reference (anekdoty about anekdoty), ethnic self-reference (anekdoty about Russians and Russian-ness), and critical reference to the nature and practice of verbal signification in more or less implicit ways. The analytical and theoretical emphasis of the dissertation is on the years 1961-86, incorporating the Stagnation period plus additional years that are significant in the genre's history. That quarter-century span in the USSR saw not only the coagulation of a way of life that provided ample fodder for oral satire, but also the appearance of a series of texts that provided source material for the topical anekdot cycles that to this day constitute a large portion of the Russian jokelore corpus. Before turning to the Soviet-period anekdot, I discuss the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century distinction between the literary or historical anekdot - a written genre not reliant on humor and in which real-life people figured - and the traditional folk anekdot, an offshoot of the folktale. The twentieth-century anekdot represented a confluence of its folkloric and inscribed forebears, combining features of (and effectively superseding) both traditions. By the 1960s, the attributes and functions the genre had accrued over the course of its development began to resonate with the underlying tropes, conflicts, and values of the society to such a degree that the anekdot became a kind of "genre-laureate" of the age. The dissertation concludes with an examination of the post-censorship anekdot, and a contextualization of the genre in the larger cultural atmosphere of contemporary Russia.

Gender and byt (everyday life) in post-Stalinist culture stem from tacit conceptions linking the quotidian to women. During the Thaw and Stagnation the posited egalitarianism of Soviet rhetoric and pre-exiting conceptions of the quotidian caused critics to use byt as shorthand for female experience and its literary expression. Addressing the prose of Natal'ia Baranskaia and I. Grekova, they connected the everyday to banality, reduced scope, ateleological time, private life, and anomaly. The authors, for their part, relied on selective representation of the quotidian and a chronotope of crisis to hesitantly address taboo subjects. During perestroika womens prose reemerged in the context of social turmoil and changing gender roles. The appearance of six literary anthologies gave women authors and Liudmila Petrushevskaia in particular a new visibility. Female writers employed discourse and a broadened chronotope of crisis, along with the eras emphasis on exposure, negation, and systematic critique, to challenge gender roles. Both supporters and opponents of womens literature now directly addressed its relation to gender instead of using byt as a euphemism. From 1991 to 2001 womens prose solidified its status as a recognized part of Russian high literature. Liudmila Ulitskaia and Svetlana Vasilenko employed a transhistorical temporality that was based on the family and offered an indirect critique of history through representation of womens byt. Critics debated the relationship between womens writing, feminism, and the new divide between elite and popular literature. Depictions of byt in the work of Ulitskaia imply that the everyday is an artistic resource in its own right as well as a conduit to higher meaning.

This dissertation is an examination of the problematic of Russian identity as manifest in the prose literature and cinema during the last two decades of the twentieth century. The reassertion of Russian national identity in the post-Soviet Russian Federation masks a crisis, the historical roots of which extend back to the development of Imperial Russia. The analysis employs the tools of Lacanian psychoanalysis to diagnose this crisis and to analyze the almost unsurmountable difficulties involved in the struggle either to recover or to create anew a usable Russian identity for the twenty-first century. The first chapter reviews the theoretical literature on nationalism as well as studies of the problematic conception of Russian nationhood. It also grounds the use of Lacanian theory for cultural analysis and illustrates, through a case study of Ivan Dykhovichnyis 1992 film Moscow Parade, the utility of a carefully deployed psychoanalytic interpretation of a cultural text from the period under consideration. The following four chapters contain analyses of four identifiable trends in late- and post-Soviet Russian literature and cinema. The heirs to the Village Prose movement, in their engagement with the postmodern environment of this period, reveal in their works an attempt to recover a lost identity that is trapped within the self-reflecting structure of an Imaginary Russia. Advocates of the postmodern in Russian culture deconstruct a Symbolic network of cultural texts in which the dissonant discourses of nation and empire generate an identity that seeks substance in the ephemeral. As the sots-art movement spread from graphic arts to literature and film, it illustrated the ultimate logic of a cultural identity based on the endless generation of ideological signifiers. Finally, the young writer Viktor Pelevin and filmmakers such as Karen Shakhnazarov illustrate the lure and the dangers of a culture that seizes upon fantasy as a way out of the cultural conundrum. The same analytical tools are deployed in the concluding chapter to argue that the period under consideration has come to an end and that Russian culture has entered a new period.

The thesis examines the transition from post-revolutionary Soviet culture (1917-1928) to the culture of the Stalinsist period, arguing for a crucial transformation in the status of agency, subjecthood, and authorship between these two historical and cultural frames. I contend that Soviet culture has much to tell us about that momentous event of the twentieth century, the death of author or, more broadly, the death of the subjectan event that Western thought has illuminated from various perspectives (philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, structural anthropology, political economy, etc.). The analysis proceeds from a consideration of prominent literary and aesthetic theories of the 1910s and 1920sFormalism, the sociological criticism of the Pereverzev school, the artistic platforms of left avant-garde, the ideological positions of RAPP, etc.in an attempt to present these often divergent currents of thought and praxis as homologous, as participating in the same act: the cultural act of modernism. Characteristic of this act, I argue, is the attempt to transcend the dimension of the individual subjective and, in this very transcendence, institute an impersonal, suprahuman objectivity. The symbolic price for reaching this state of superhuman truth is the instrumentalization of human agency. The concrete result of the modernist act is Stalinism: a world in which the very production of truth and reality is coterminous with the ritualistic surrender of agency and autonomy. In the thesis second part, I discuss socialist realism as a concrete instance of this surrender, seeking to demonstrate to what extent the position of the so-called representing subject in socialist realism is antinomic with the notion of authorship.

Incorporated into contemporary culture through high-, middle-, and lowbrow manifestations, Tolstois Anna Karenina repeatedly demonstrates its ubiquity. The novels reincarnations in various cultural forms consistently privilege the Anna-Vronskii story line over the parallel narrative of Kitty and Levin, thus liberating the adultery myth from its novelistic shackles. This remarkable diffusion and myth-oriented interpretation of Anna Karenina largely stems from the cinemas fascination with the novel. The freedom with which filmmakers handle the allegedly well-known novel reveals the discrepancy between the literary text and its idea in the collective unconscious. This freedom also indicates that in popular awareness visual embodiments of Anna Karenina have become more authoritative than the novel itself. While shedding light on dramatic changes that have occurred in the collective idea of Tolstois novel, cinemaas a medium aiming at a mass audiencealso manifests its essential connection with a myth of love that is stronger than death. The filmmakers constant maneuvering between myth and novel defies the latter as an unequivocal source of adaptation and thus justifies the approach I advocate in my dissertation: namely, bypassing the rigid binary opposition the literary source versus its screen version. Interpreted as vehicles for recycling an old story of adulterous love, films of Anna Karenina reveal two overarching tendencies in their attempts to transpose the nineteenth-century text to the screentendencies they share independently of their production date, country of production, and film format. The first strengthens the underlying myth of adultery by stripping the literary text of everything irrelevant to the mythical skeleton. The second disguises that skeleton by reproducing the accompanying subplots from the literary source. Yet even versions deeply rooted in the literary source are influenced by a myth-oriented perspective. Though my principal emphasis falls on screen adaptations, I also analyze the novels recasting as a comic book. Unlike screen adaptations, this postmodernist revision of the novel was undertaken with the hope of undermining the novels elevated status as well as the fame of its creator, thus signaling a successful completion of its long journey into the mass unconscious.

THE RUSSIAN REFLEXIVE IN SECOND-LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: BINDING PREFERENCES AND L1 TRANSFER Annalisa Czeczulin, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2007 This dissertation investigates knowledge of reflexives by adult English-speaking learners of Russian as a second language. The study uses an experimental methodology to ascertain the extent to which a speakers native language (L1) influences his or her acquisition of the second language (L2). The thesis concerns L2 acquisition of the reflexive object pronoun sebja, the reflexive possessive pronoun svoj, and the post-verbal affix sja and investigates the claim that unlike in English, in Russian some anaphors may be bound long-distance (LD) outside non-finite embedded clauses. Twenty non-native and ten native speakers of Russian were tested during the first experiment, and ten non-native and ten native speakers during the second experiment. The experiments were based on Bennett and Progovac (1993) and White et al (1997). The first experiment found that the more proficient the L2 speakers become, the more their binding pattern reflects that of the L1 informants, suggesting that the L2 subjects depend on their L1 parameters and settings to bind in the L2, but that this dependence wanes as they become more proficient. L2 learners of Russian maintain their L1 AGR parameter in the L2, but transfer their L1 Xmax binding type at first. Following training, L2 subjects showed greater sensitivity to ambiguity of reference for sebja than native Russian speakers or overgeneralized the training. Although no resetting of parameters was observed during the research, the possibility of resetting parameters looks promising. This resetting will vary across reflexive and sentence types. The second experiment, which evaluated the effects of preferences and pragmatics on binding, suggests that two grammars exist in Russian speakers and that language change may be underway in Russian where LD anaphora are concerned. The L2 subjects were less successful in this experiment and violated the c-command requirement for reflexives. LD binding could be induced through introduction of a verb of power in combination with a LD antecedent deemed to have control over the local antecedent. The experiments results conclude that Bennett and Progovacs (1993) X0/Xmax addition to Chomskys Binding Theory does not adequately explain the current binding situation in Russian.

My dissertation situates itself at the intersection of several fields: Soviet cultural studies, film genre theory, and masculinity studies. It investigates the articulation of genre categories in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema industries, with a specific focus on the cultural context within which the buddy film emerges in late Soviet culture. This genre is unique within contemporary Russian cinema for providing a visual and narrative structure within which the masculine crisisa topic widely written about by Russian sociologists and gender scholarsbecomes visible. This masculine crisis is more often than not masked by compensatory, hyper-macho images in other genres (e.g., war films, gangster films, historical epics). The buddy film, by contrast, exhibits a type of masculinity rarely glimpsed on screen; these characters are the disillusioned, the marginalized, and the disenfranchised men of late- and post-Soviet society. My argument is grounded in a thorough examination of male-centered Russian buddy films from 1970 until the present dayspecifically, I look at such films as A. Smirnovs Belorusskii vokzal (1970), P. Lungins Taksi-bliuz (1990), V. Abdrashitovs Vremia tantsora (1997), A. Rogozhkins Kukushka (2002), V. Todorovskiis Liubovnik (2002), and A. Muradovs Pravda o shchelpakh (2003). I also dedicate the final chapter to a consideration of several notable exceptions to the standard male buddy film: V. Todorovskiis Strana glukhikh (1998), S. Bodrov Jr.s Sestry (2001), F. Popovs Kavkazkaia ruletka (2002), and M. Liubakovas Zhestokost' (2007) in which two women substitute for the typical male pair. I draw on the work of Althusserian film genre theorist Rick Altman, who seeks out the source of genre components in social practice. Altman insists on acknowledging the historicism and subjectivity in the study of genre. Relying on such considerations of genre, my dissertation treats the buddy film from several perspectives: it looks at the genres antecedents from the Stalinist and Thaw periods, it tracks changes in the genre as cultural and ideological imperatives shift over the past seventy years, and it considers how gender representations adapt to these cultural and ideological transformations.

The dissertation concerns the construction of Stalins White Sea-Baltic Canal (Belomorsko-Baltiskii Kanal imeni Stalina), one of the most significant and infamous forced-labor projects of Soviet Russia. In just twenty months from 1931-1933, political and criminal prisoners built a 227-kilometer-long canal in extreme environmental conditions, without the help of any modern equipment. This early Gulag project differed greatly from others in its broad use of art and creativity as a motivational and propagandistic tool. Prisoners performed in agitbrigady (agitational brigades), participated in camp-wide competitions of poetry and prose, worked as journalists at the camp newspaper Perekovka, and attended theatrical performances completely produced by fellow prisoners. Art, in turn, not only served as entertainment but also had the capacity to transform human beings through the ideological process of perekvovka (re-forging), which supposedly re-fashioned wayward criminals into productive members of Soviet society. Through extensive use of archival documents, the dissertation aims to highlight the experience of criminal prisoners in the Gulag, a long understudied demographic of the Soviet prison camp system. Self and society were both re-created at the Belomorkanal with the help of aesthetic products, and what was begun as a laboratory for Soviet culture becomes a utopian vision. This dystopian utopia was riddled by the paradoxes surrounding itin an environment of supposed re-birth and creation there was ubiquitous death and destruction. This explains the important roles that collage, montage, and assemblage play as artistic styles and metaphorical concepts. Collage exemplifies the shredding of the world in order to create a new, unified whole; montage in film and photography promises the creation of non-existentand idealizedworlds; assemblage, in its three-dimensionality, is used in contemporary artworks about the Canal and can be understood metaphorically, with the Canals various bits of lock, dam, and dike pieced together and subsequently stitched with other waterways. From the outset, the significance of the Belomorkanal was seen within the larger industrial context of Stalins first Five-Year Plan, and the project has important cultural significance not only for the history of the Gulag but also for the study of Stalinism and the Soviet Union as a whole.