Political Animals: Representing Dogs in Modern Russian Culture

Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-90-420-3902-5
Verlag: Brill | Rodopi

Buch, Englisch, Band 59, 434 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 679 g

Reihe: Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics

This book is the first interdisciplinary study of the representation of dogs in Russian discourse since the nineteenth century. Focusing on the correlation between humans and dogs in traditional belief systems, in literature, film and other cultural productions, it shows that the dog as a political construct incorporates various contradictions, with different representations investing the dog with multiple, often-paradoxical meanings – moral, social and philosophical. From the peasantry’s dislike of the gentry’s hunting dogs and children’s cruelty to dogs in Pushkin and Dostoevsky to the establishment of the Soviet dynasties of border guard and police dogs, from Pavlov’s laboratory dogs to the monuments to the cosmic dog Laika and the subversive dog impersonations by the contemporary performance artist Oleg Kulik, the book explores the intersections of species-class-gender-sexuality-race-disability and, paradoxically, of Arcadian and Utopian dreams and scientific deeds. This study contributes to the unfolding cultural history of human-animal relations across cultures.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mondry, Henrietta

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Regierungspolitik Innen-, Bildungs- und Bevölkerungspolitik
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gesellschaft & Tiere

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents
Preface: Vladimir Durov’s dog story: A thematic capsule
Introduction
Part One: Exploring Cruelty, Injustice, and the Shifting Hierarchies between Dogs and Humans
Chapter 1. When dogs were more expensive than people
Chapter 2. ‘The Children’s Hour’: Cruelty to dogs
Chapter 3. Degradation narratives: Dogs and humans in social and moral transformation
Part Two: Exploring Emotional Needs: Dogs and their Underdog Partners
Chapter 4. The fate of dogs in partnerships with the marginalised Other
Chapter 5. Dogs and inmates in prison and Gulags: Writing and re-writing the humanistic canon
Part Three: Dogs in the Service of their Country
Chapter 6. Dogs and their masters in police and prison service: 1960s-1980s
Chapter 7. The cult of the border guard dogs
Part Four: Transitions, Transformations, Transgressions
Chapter 8. The hunter’s dog as hunted: White Bim Black Ear as the cult event of the Stagnation Era, 1970s-1980s
Chapter 9. Transformation narratives: physical, metaphysical, scientific
Chapter 10. Sleeping with the animal: boundary crossing in life and art (from pre-Revolutionary modernism to post-Soviet postmodernism)
Conclusion: Dogs are ‘good to think’
Bibliography
Index