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The Archeology of Banality: The Soviet Home

The Archeology of Banality: The Soviet Home Public Culture 1994, 6 : 263-292 @ 1994 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0899-236319410602-0002$01.00 Public Culture of private life" in Soviet R ~ s s i aIn~fact, in Russian there has never been a single . word for "privacy". This is not a mere linguistic accident; there has been a sustained intellectual critique of the Western concept of the "private individual" and of "mercantile civilization" from nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia of both Western and Slavophile leanings, to Bolsheviks and left avant-garde artists, to the contemporary nationalist- patriot^.^ If, in the American cultural mythology, everyday life (the "American lifestyle") and individual self-sufficiency are the foundations of the national dream, in Russia it is a resistance to the ordinary, and a belonging to Russian spiritual culture (which could be coupled with a future-oriented Soviet ideology) that until recently have constituted a national civic religion. (Now both of these national mythologies seem to be waning.) In Russian and Soviet intellectual history, banality and everyday life have become conflated and interchangeable, and both are inextricably linked to the icons of the national ideology and to the paradoxes of patriotism. So how can we begin to defarniliarize the defamiliarization of the http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Public Culture Duke University Press

The Archeology of Banality: The Soviet Home

Boym, Svetlana
Public Culture , Volume 6 (2) – Jan 1, 1994
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 1994 by Duke University Press
ISSN
0899-2363
eISSN
1527-8018
DOI
10.1215/08992363-6-2-263
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Public Culture 1994, 6 : 263-292 @ 1994 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0899-236319410602-0002$01.00 Public Culture of private life" in Soviet R ~ s s i aIn~fact, in Russian there has never been a single . word for "privacy". This is not a mere linguistic accident; there has been a sustained intellectual critique of the Western concept of the "private individual" and of "mercantile civilization" from nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia of both Western and Slavophile leanings, to Bolsheviks and left avant-garde artists, to the contemporary nationalist- patriot^.^ If, in the American cultural mythology, everyday life (the "American lifestyle") and individual self-sufficiency are the foundations of the national dream, in Russia it is a resistance to the ordinary, and a belonging to Russian spiritual culture (which could be coupled with a future-oriented Soviet ideology) that until recently have constituted a national civic religion. (Now both of these national mythologies seem to be waning.) In Russian and Soviet intellectual history, banality and everyday life have become conflated and interchangeable, and both are inextricably linked to the icons of the national ideology and to the paradoxes of patriotism. So how can we begin to defarniliarize the defamiliarization of the

Journal

Public Culture – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 1994

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