Publisher's Synopsis
**Articles: * A Multi-Lectic Anatomy of Stiob and Poshlost: Case Studies in the Oeuvre of Timur Novikov, Ivor Stodolsky (in English). The article introduces a new method for the empirical analysis of cultural phenomena, called multi-lectic anatomy. It is applied to two key culture-political art actions by Leningrad/Saint Petersburg artist Timur Novikov (1958 2002), who gained fame through a wide range of symbolic conceits, creating assumed satirical intentions, cynical denials, kynic hoaxes, and spoofs. The article describes Novikov s postmodern games and paradoxes as elaborate cultural expressions of a banal vacuum of values, and raises questions concerning the wider historical significance of his supposedly dangerous artistic strategies. * Russian State and Civil Society in Interaction: An Ethnographic Approach, Meri Kulmala (in English). Interaction between civil society organizations and the state in Russia is analyzed on the basis of fieldwork in the Sortavala district in Karelia. The liberal and statist models wrongly assume that civil society and the state are distinct and opposing entities; this study shows that in practice they overlap and intersect. The cases discussed are a Municipal Social Service Center that bundles public and civic efforts; an independent child protection organization that actively collaborates with the authorities; and a network of women s organizations that has successfully proposed regional policy initiatives. * The Power of Dress in Contemporary Russian Society: On Glamour Discourse and the Everyday Practice of Getting Dressed in Russian Cities, Katharina Klingseis (in English). Among the urban middle class in post-Soviet Russia glamour continues to serve as an ideological representation of power. Helped by glamour ideology, status rituals banned from official discourse throughout the Soviet era have gone from collective repressed to cultural imperative. Based on interviews with women in Yekaterinburg and Moscow, the article analyzes glamour as a micro-mechanism of power. For women socialized under Stalin, elegance under conditions of scarcity was a matter of inventiveness. For the Khrushchev generation, glamour is related to normative notions of taste, status, and femininity. For young urban professionals today, dress is a tool for achieving professional and private goals. * TV Therapy without Psychology: Adapting the Self in Post-Soviet Media, Julia Lerner (in Russian). The article discusses the constitution of a new therapeutic emotional cultural style in post-Soviet Russia. The alternative tradition of subjectivity in the Russian/Soviet cultural universe lacks a therapeutic Self, and the post-Soviet discursive condition is characterized by a gap in authoritative discourses of articulation of individual and private life. As a result of these conditions the therapeutic culture is developing in post-Soviet Russia prior to or without psychology, and above all, it is not a product or function of psychological knowledge. * Memory, Gender, Silence: Oral history in (Post-)Soviet Russia and the Blurry Line Between the Public and the Private, Anika Walke (in Russian). The paper discusses methodological and ethical challenges of oral history projects that address experiences of systematic violence. Utilizing theoretical and methodological approaches to oral history, especially of feminist scholarship, it offers a discussion of the relationship between individual remembering and social discourses about the past, interrogating how this relationship affects the representation of gendered experiences in the Soviet partisan movement during World War II."
