Primary Source on Soviet interest in western goods/culture 50s-70s

[Sasha Senderovich]

A wonderful depository of (mostly nostalgically portrayed) images of Soviet
interest in American culture in the 1950s can be found in Valerii
Todorovsky's film "Stiliagi" that came out in Russia last winter. I saw it
in Russia so I don't know whether a subtitled copy exists yet. But even if
it doesn't, the film could yield productive clips that could work without
translation - the film is a musical, so clips would demonstrate the
appropriation of musical forms, fashions, etc.  For the purposes of your
course this would not provide the primary text that you are looking for, but
might yield a few minutes of additional "contextual" illustration (with a
caveat that these images come from a 2009 film made at the time when
Russia's interest in America is different from that of the 1950s).

For a quick reference, the Russian wikipedia has a fairly detailed entry on
this film:
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BB%D1%8F%D0%B3%D0%B8_%28%D1%84%D0%B8%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BC,_2008%29

All the best,
Sasha Senderovich

=================================
Sasha Senderovich, PhD candidate
Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard
senderov at fas.harvard.edu


On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 11:15 AM, Qualin, Anthony <ANTHONY.QUALIN at ttu.edu>wrote:

> Dear Rachel,
>
> There is a great scene about everyone's obsession with a stapler in the
> beginning of Bitov's "Bezdel'nik." An English translation as "The Idler"
> exists somewhere.
>
> Yuri Shevchuk's (DDT) song "Khipany" has a lot of English influenced slang
> in it and is a pretty fun song.
>
> I haven't watched it in a long time so my memory is fuzzy, but Gorod Zero
> should be good with all of its early rock and roll thematics. Okno v Parizh
> would be good, but it's just outside of the period you are interested in.
>
> Tony
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Anthony Qualin
> Associate Professor
> Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures
> Texas Tech University
> Lubbock, Texas 79409-2071
>
> Telephone: 806-742-3145 ext. 244
> Fax: 806-742-3306
> E-mail: anthony.qualin at ttu.edu
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