[Discussion] New Book: Alexei Yurchak Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (Princeton UP, 2005)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: "Serguei Alex. Oushakine" <sao15@columbia.edu>

Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More:
The Last Soviet Generation

Alexei Yurchak

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar
experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the 
collapse
seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the 
moment of
collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed
simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and 
full of
promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, 
in fact
they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of 
Soviet life
during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of 
the last
Soviet generation.

Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse,
ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of 
multiple
unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits 
that this
transformation enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic 
analysis
draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet
period. The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an 
alternative to
binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official 
culture and
unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self,
truth and lie--and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet 
citizens, the
fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely 
important,
although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and 
rules of
the socialist state.

Alexei Yurchak is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of
California, Berkeley.

Endorsements:

"In this remarkable book, Alexei Yurchak asks: How can we account for the
paradox that Soviet people both experienced their system as immutable 
and yet
were unsurprised by its end? In answering this question, he develops a
brilliant, entirely novel theory of the nature of Soviet socialism and the
reasons for its collapse. The book is must reading for anyone interested 
in this
most momentous change of contemporary history, as well as in the place of
language in social transformation. A tour de force!"--Katherine M. Verdery,
author of What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?

"Alexei Yurchak brilliantly debunks several widely held misconceptions 
about the
lived experience of late socialism in Soviet Russia, and does so through a
compelling dossier of materials, all creatively conceived, organized, and
analyzed. The writing is fluid, accessible, interesting, and beautifully
structured and styled."--Nancy Ries, Colgate University, author of 
Russian Talk:
Culture and Conversation during Perestroika

"This ambitious book admirably combines a new theoretical approach with 
detailed
ethnographic materials. Written in a clear and engaging style, it is both
thorough and precise, and provides a new and convincing insight that will
definitely be central to all serious discussions of Soviet-type systems for
years to come--namely, that the shift in Soviet life from a semantic to a
pragmatic model of ideological discourse served to undermine the ideological
system."--Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge, and author of The 
Unmaking
of Soviet Life

Paper | November 2005 | $24.95 / £15.95 | ISBN: 0-691-12117-6
Cloth | November 2005 | $59.50 / £38.95 | ISBN: 0-691-12116-8

336 pp. | 6 x 9 | 15 halftones. 3 line illus. 4 tables.

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/8102.html