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.
Reviews
"McReynolds (Univ. of Hawaii) . . . has here turned her considerable talents to an investigation of pre-Revolutionary Russia's 'leisure time' activities. . . . In arguing that vibrant commercial values had penetrated an emerging sport, dramatic, nightclub, and cheap movie house culture, McReynolds again, as she has so often in the past, sheds new light on a neglected but important facet of Imperial Russian history. Summing up: Highly Recommended. Advanced undergraduates and graduate students." --G. E. Snow, Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, Choice, Sept. 2003.
"In her well-researched and stimulating [book], Louise McReynolds brings firmly to our attention the late tsarist leisure industry and show show it can deepen our understanding of Russian culture and society. . . . The book also has more than fifty well-chosen illustrations: street scenes, sports photos, photo-portraits (especially of actors), cartoons, and promotional pictures of resorts."—Stephen Lovell, SEER 81:4, 2003
"Russia at Play is full of interesting information for students of culture of both the Imperial and the Soviet period, and it makes an important contribution to the discussion of Russian identity. . . . This thorough study of leisure makes a fascinating addition to our understanding of politics, gender, and daily life in the late Imperial period while simultaneously indicating many areas warranting increased research."—Tricia Starks, University of Arkansas, The Russian Review 63:1, Jan. 2004
"First and foremost it is a recovery of little-known stories of Russian leisure activities, an effort to 'resurrect' what has largely 'vanished' from historical memory. . . . This recovery of the past is often quite celebratory (the author's pleasure in discovering and telling these tales of Russians 'at play' is apparent), yet this appreciation has interpretive weight. Louise McReynolds argues, against the well-known contempt for commercial entertainment by contemporary culturalist intellectuals, that Russia's growing commercial mass culture offered citizens facing a rapidly changing modern society much of value. Above all, it offered Russians opportunities to orient themselves as individuals and social beings, to fashion and adapt new identities, and to find refuge."—Mark D. Steinberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Slavic Review 63:1, Spring 2004
"This volume is both a welcome contribution to the growing literature on the religious practices of Hispanic immigrants and a useful resource for reflecting on the theological implications of relgiosidad popular (religion of the people)."—John T. Ford, Catholic University of America, Religious Studies Review, January 2004, vol. 30, no. 1
With this book, Louise McReynolds has secured her reputation as the premiere historian of late imperial Russian culture. This vigorously written and superbly researched overview of Russian urban culture from the 1870s to the end of the Romanov dynasty dispels many deeply entrenched clichés about Russia's "modernization" (or lack thereof). It is based on extensive primary source research and reflects McReynolds's broad familiarity with secondary materials in American, European, and Russian cultural history and cultural theory. Wearing its theoretical mantle lightly, the book will satisfy both traditional and nouveaux. It deserves to be widely read. . . . This book will be the standard introduction to the subject for many years and will doubtless inspire much new research. And fittingly, it is great fun to read."—Denise L. Youngblood, University of Vermont, American Historical Review, June 2004
Russia at Play is an erudite, entertaining, and informative analysis of commercial culture in late imperial Russia. Historian Louise McReynolds takes a serious look at fun, examining how Russia's burgeoning middle class spent its leisure time from the middle of the nineteenth century to 1917 and the influence of entertainment on "the worlds of work, society, and politics" (6)."—Jennifer Ryan Tishler, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slavic and East European Journal, Spring 2004, vol. 48, no. 1
"I teach a class on Russian popular culture in which I make a strenuous attempt to connect politics and leisure activities in a perhaps misguided effort to convince students that the things people do for fun are not frivolous. As a student once pointed out to me, however, not everything has to be about politics. Culture and entertainment are important in their own right, as Louise McReynolds's recent monograph, Russia at Play, clearly demonstrates. Although the book is more an initial foray into the diversity of nineteenth-century Russian popular culture than a definitive treatment, it articulates a broad agenda for the further study of prerevolutionary cultural life. . . . McReynolds offers her readers an entertaining and illuminating account of the growing importance of sport to prerevolutionary society."—Lynn Sargeant, Postdoctoral Fellow, National Academy of Education/ The Spencer Foundation
"Louise McReynolds sets out to rescue middlebrow entertainment from the condescension of a histography dominated by intelligentsia-inspired idolization of Russia's high culture. . . . [the book offers] new perspectives on the old problem of Russia's 'missing' middle class, by taking us far from the thematic and chronological limits conventionally imposed on our views of this social group. We get a new sense of the vigour and scale of the emerging 'commercial culture' and its celebration of a marketplace of values in Russia before 1917."—Dan Healey, University of Wales, Cultural and Social History, 2004, vol. 1, no. 1
“Russia at Play. . . is a breath of fresh air. A study of urban popular culture in prerevolutionary Russia is, by definition, a study of the development of the way of life, values, and self-conception of the emerging middle classes. . . . Russia at Play opens up new horizons for the analysis of prerevolutionary cultural life.”—Lynn Sargeant, H-Net Reviews, May 2004
"Louise McReynolds's book provides a vivid picture of a new side of pre-Revolutionary Russia: a dynamic and diverse mass culture of theater, film, night life, and restaurants that expressed the dreams and social identity of Russia's emerging middle-class."—Richard Wortman
"Louise McReynolds continues to amaze with her boundless curiosity and sparkling comparative and theoretical insights. Russia at Play buzzes with energy and comes to life in vivid pictorial scenes full of well-rounded human beings. It
explores not the dark recesses of an unknown past, but the lighter side of life—hunting, combat sports, performance art, movies—in a long-needed re-creation of cultural and social practices among all classes in pre-revolutionary Russia.
Readers will derive as much pleasure from this book as the author obviously did from writing it."—Richard Stites, Professor of History, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University
"Louise McReynolds has given us a book on pre-Revolutionary Russian entertainment that is massively and inventively researched, clearly written, theoretically sophisticated, deeply comparative and, yes, entertaining. Setting her work in a modern, urban, and capitalist Russia, McReynolds presents a no-longer-missing middle class, engaged not with high culture
and nation-saving but rather with sports, tourism, restaurants, movies, and cabaret life. She gives new meaning to the term
'party politics.'"--Robert Edelman, University of California, San Diego
