Russia's Carnival: The Smells, Sights, and Sounds of Transition [Paperback]

Set against a grey and rigid Soviet past, this book provides a rich picture of people rapidly adapting to a market economy and to intensified exposure to Western culture.A colorful tapestry of observations.This lively and entertaining book represents a highly original contribution to the growing literature on post-Soviet Russia. The author takes us on a richly sensual tour of the country in which he lived and worked as a journalist for almost ten years. Not surprisingly perhaps, he maintains that today's Russia is a fundamentally different place from the Socialist state which it replaced barely more than a decade ago. The book's distinctiveness comes not so much from this assertion, however, as from the evidence that Neidhart advances in order to support his thesis. This is a remarkable book, not least for the way in which Neidhart manages to write with both the freshness and immediacy of a journalist and the conceptual sophistication of a cultural anthropologist. As a result his book will appeal to readers in a broad range of disciplines, including sociology, economics, history, and politics.Christopher Neidhart has written an innovative and provocative book detailing the unprecedented changes experienced by the people of Russia. Using the carnival metaphor of the Russian writer and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin, Neidhart chronicles the everyday transformations and adaptations of a people and society as they attempt to cope with the many uncertainties of life in post-soviet Russia?.Unlike many first-hand accounts of Russia, which are often based on insufficient background information and little in-country experience, Neidhart's work is the result of many years of living in Russia. But it is much more than that; it is the intellectual culmination of a serious attempt to understand and experience for himself the nearly incomprehensible changes in the daily lives of average citizens?.Russia's Carnival is a well-researched work that combines theoretical sophistication wlƒ½