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LITERATURES, CULTURES, AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Energy Culture
Work, Power, and Waste
in Russia and the Soviet Union
Edited by
Jillian Porter
Maya Vinokour
Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment
Series Editors
Ursula K. Heise
Department of English
University of California
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Gisela Heffes
Rice University
Houston, TX, USA
Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment focuses on new research in the
Environmental Humanities, particularly work with a rhetorical or literary
dimension. Books in this series explore how ideas of nature and environ-
mental concerns are expressed in different cultural contexts and at differ-
ent historical moments. They investigate how cultural assumptions and
practices, as well as social structures and institutions, shape conceptions of
nature, the natural, species boundaries, uses of plants, animals and natural
resources, the human body in its environmental dimensions, environmen-
tal health and illness, and relations between nature and technology. In
turn, the series makes visible how concepts of nature and forms of envi-
ronmentalist thought and representation arise from the confluence of a
community's ecological and social conditions with its cultural assump-
tions, perceptions, and institutions.
Jillian Porter • Maya Vinokour
Editors
Energy Culture
Work, Power, and Waste in Russia and the
Soviet Union
Editors
Jillian Porter Maya Vinokour
University of Colorado Boulder New York University
Boulder, CO, USA New York, NY, USA
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
v
Contents
1 Introduction:
Energy Culture in Russia and the Soviet
Union 1
Jillian Porter and Maya Vinokour
2 The
Energy of Chernyshevsky’s Vera Pavlovna in the
Modern Cultural Economy 21
Konstantine Klioutchkine
3 T
he Energy Trap: Anna Karenina as a Parable for the
Twenty-First Century 41
Jillian Porter
4 Picturing
Coal in the Donbas: Nikolai Kasatkin and the
Energy of Late Realism 65
Molly Brunson
5 Polar
Fantasies: Valery Bryusov and the Russian
Symbolist Electric Aesthetic 87
Polina Dimova
6 Energetic
Liquids in Pre-Revolutionary Russian
Utopianism113
Maya Vinokour
vii
viii Contents
7 Revolutionary
Burnout and the Rise of the Soviet
Rest Regime143
William Nickell
8 The
Mechanics and Energetics of Soviet Communism:
The Poetics of Peat163
Robert Bird
9 Leonid
Brezhnev and the Elixir of Life195
Joy Neumeyer
10 Russian
Oil: Tragic Past, Radiant Future, and the
Resurrection of the Dead225
Ilya Kalinin
11 Of
Mice and Degenerators: Post-progress Energy and
Posthuman Bodies in Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx249
Meghan Vicks
12 Hydrocarbons
on Hold: Energy Aesthetics of Teriberka
in the Russian Arctic273
Jessica K. Graybill, Yang Zhang, and Isobel Hooker
13 A
fterword on Chernobyl (2019): A Soviet Propaganda
Win Delivered 33 Years Late297
Kate Brown
Index305
Notes on Contributors
Robert Bird was Professor of Slavic and Cinema and Media Studies at
the University of Chicago; the author of numerous publications including
Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (2008; his own Russian translation
2021), Fyodor Dostoevsky (2012), The Russian Prospero: The Creative
Universe of Viacheslav Ivanov (2006), and the forthcoming Soul Machine:
Soviet Film Models Socialism; and editor and curator of Revolution Every
Day: A Calendar (2017).
Kate Brown is Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History
of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author
of several prize-winning histories, including Plutopia: Nuclear Families,
Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters
(2013). Her latest book, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the
Future (2019), translated into nine languages, was a finalist for the 2020
National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pushkin House Award, and the
Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage.
Molly Brunson is Associate Professor of Russian Literature and the
History of Art at Yale University. She writes and teaches broadly on the
literature and art of Russia’s long nineteenth century. Her first book,
Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840–1890, won the award for
Best Book in Cultural Studies from the American Association of Teachers
of Slavic and East European Languages in 2017. Brunson is working on a
second book, The Russian Point of View: Perspective and the Birth of
Modern Russian Culture.
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
early Soviet intellectual and cultural history, and historical and cultural
politics in contemporary Russia. He has published in a wide range of jour-
nals, including Ab Imperio, Arche, Baltic Worlds, Osteuropa, Die Welt der
Slaven, Sign Systems Studies, Social Sciences, Russian Literature, Russian
Studies, Russian Studies in Literature, Russian Studies in Philosophy,
Slavonica, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, New Literary Observer, and
Logos. His essays have been translated into 14 languages. His book History
as the Art of Articulation: Russian Formalists and Revolution is forthcom-
ing from the New Literary Observer Publishing House (Moscow).
Konstantine Klioutchkine is Associate Professor of Russian at Pomona
College in Claremont, California. He works in the fields of cultural history
and media studies. As part of these interests, he has published articles on
Nikolai Karamzin, Nikolai Nekrasov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov,
and Vasily Rozanov.
Joy Neumeyer is a journalist and historian of Russia and Eastern Europe.
She holds a PhD in History (2020) from UC Berkeley and held a postdoc-
toral fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence. Her
publications include “Late Socialism as a Time of Weeping: The Life,
Death, and Resurrection of Vladimir Vysotskii” (Kritika, summer 2021)
and “Darkness at Noon: On History, Narrative, and Domestic Violence”
(American Historical Review, June 2021). Her writing on Russia and
Eastern Europe has appeared in publications including The New York
Times, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and The Nation.
William Nickell is a cultural historian and Associate Professor of Russian
literature at the University of Chicago. His forthcoming book, The Soviet
Cure, considers problems of medical subjectivity and medical aesthetics,
asking how people in the USSR formed their beliefs in the efficacy of
socialized medicine. The book considers how medical authority is shaped
not only by diagnostic and curative practice but also by narratives of health
and disease and by the patient’s aesthetic experience of healthcare in all its
dimensions.
Jillian Porter is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and
Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Colorado Boulder.
She is the author of Economies of Feeling: Russian Literature Under
Nicholas I and has published essays on money, commodities, and the
queue in Russian and Soviet literature and cinema.
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xiii
xiv List of Figures
1
According to a 2019 report published in the Yale Environment Review, scientists from
Oxford and Utrecht define “the Point of No Return” as “the year after which even aggressive
policy measures would be unlikely to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal by the end of the
century.” The study in question appeared in the European Geosciences Union’s Earth
Systems Dynamics journal in Spring 2018 under the title “The point of no return for climate
action: effects of climate uncertainty and risk tolerance.”
J. Porter
University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA
e-mail: jillian.porter@colorado.edu
M. Vinokour (*)
New York University, New York, NY, USA
e-mail: mvv221@nyu.edu
spills of the Persian Gulf War and BP’s Deepwater Horizon.2 The latest
scientific consensus is grim: human extraction of industrial and biological
energy from fossil fuels and animal-based foods is disrupting the Earth’s
ecological balance at a terrifying rate. Rapid environmental depletion ben-
efits the wealthy few while subjecting marginalized populations to dispro-
portionate climate violence and placing numerous non-human species
in peril.
Even as governments, NGOs, and scientists urge us to act on behalf of
life itself, our personal energy is commodified as a limited resource. With
the popularization of the “life hack,” our mental, emotional, and physical
resources have become subject to self- or employer-imposed technologies
that claim to “optimize” our vital forces. Popular media outlets advise us
to eliminate “energy vampires” from our social circles and to “recharge”
and “reset” our minds, the better to maintain the integrity of what Dr.
Strangelove’s General Jack Ripper called our “precious bodily fluids.”3 At
the same time, corporations exhort us to combat climate change individu-
ally through round-the-clock eco-shopping. So dire is the situation, we are
told, that only a truly universal effort can forestall disaster. Add to cart.
Purchase now.
The pressing nowness of contemporary energy discourse makes it easy
to forget how critical this topic has felt, and how variously it has been
conceived, throughout the modern era. The phlogiston-obsessed chemist
of circa 1800, the early-twentieth-century quantum physicist, and the
neoliberal champion of “human capital” all imagined energy outside the
framework of disaster. Somewhat closer to our present sensibilities were
the Victorians, whose confidence in energy’s seemingly boundless poten-
tial for spurring progress was tempered by fossilized evidence of past over-
consumption and theoretical proof of eventual entropic heat death.4 Yet if
the Victorians considered the possibility that humans might someday
exhaust Earth’s resources, they did not foresee that efforts to furnish
2
When it comes to energy use and its environmental consequences, human beings are not
universally responsible or affected. In using terms like “we” and “us” when discussing con-
temporary energy consciousness, the editors have likely readers of this volume in mind.
3
For a discussion of energetic themes in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), including the
references to “precious bodily fluids,” see Jerome Franklin Shapiro, Atomic Bomb Cinema:
The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film (New York: Routledge, 2001), 165.
4
W. J. Thomas Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon
(Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), 210; Gillian Beer, “The Death of the Sun: Victorian Solar
Physics and Futures,” Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford, 1999), 219–41.
1 INTRODUCTION: ENERGY CULTURE IN RUSSIA AND THE SOVIET UNION 3
5
See, for instance, Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History (MIT, 2017); Cara New
Daggett, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke
Univ. Press, 2019); Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History (New York, NY: Simon &
Schuster, 2019); Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical
Thermodynamics (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Barri J. Gold,
ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2010); Lynn M. Voskuil, ed., Nineteenth-Century Energies: Literature, Technology, Culture
(New York: Routledge, 2016); Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer eds., Energy Humanities:
An Anthology (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2017); and Matúš Mišík and
Nada Kujundžić, eds., Energy Humanities: Current State and Future Directions
(Springer, 2021).
6
A selection of relevant recent volumes on Russian energy politics and history includes:
Thane Gustafson, Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia (Belknap Press of
Harvard Univ. Press, 2012); Per Högselius, Red Gas: Russia and the Origins of European
Energy Dependence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Agnia Grigas, The Politics of Energy and
Memory between the Baltic States and Russia (Routledge, 2013); Ryan C. Maness and
Brandon Valeriano, eds., Russia’s Coercive Diplomacy: Energy, Cyber, and Maritime Policy as
New Sources of Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Matthew Sussex and Roger E. Kanet, eds.,
Russia, Eurasia and the New Geopolitics of Energy: Confrontation and Consolidation (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015); Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen, The Energy of Russia: Hydrocarbon Culture and
Climate Change (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019); Gustafson, The Bridge: Natural Gas in a
Divided Europe (Harvard Univ. Press, 2020); and Margarita Balmaceda, Russian Energy
Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union
(Columbia Univ. Press, 2021).
4 J. PORTER AND M. VINOKOUR
9
On the history of the Imperial Russian petroleum industry, see Blau, Baku; Nat Moser,
Oil and the Economy of Russia: From the Late Tsarist to the Post-Soviet Period (New York:
Routledge, 2018); Vagit Alekperov, Oil of Russia: Past, Present, and Future, trans. Paul
B. Gallagher and Thomas D. Hedden (Minneapolis, MN: Eastview Press, 2011); Irina
D’iakonova, Neft’ i ugol v energetike tsarskoi Rossii v mezhdunarodnykh sopostavleniiakh
(Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999); Mariia Slavkina, Rossiiskaia dobycha (Moscow: Rodina Media,
2014); R. W. Tolf, The Russian Rockefellers: The Saga of the Nobel Family and the Russian Oil
Industry (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1976); N. A. Luk’ianov, Nobeli Rossii
(Moscow: Zemlia i chelovek, 2006). On Alexandre Michon, see Aydin Kazimzade,
“Celebrating 100 Years in Film, Not 80,” Azerbaijan International, 5 no. 3 (1997): 30–5.
See also, Alexandre Michon’s “The Oil Gush in Balakhany,” film, 43 sec., 1898, Youtube,
accessed June 6, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjKVHrGH_Po. Alexandre
Michon, “The Oil Gush Fire in Bibiheybat,” film, 48 sec., 1898, Youtube, accessed June 6,
2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLuCJukduSw.
6 J. PORTER AND M. VINOKOUR
Fig. 1.1 Alexandre Michon, “Oil Fountain of the Gorny Cooperative, Struck in
September of 1887 (Balkhany near Baku).” From the entry for “Oil” (“Neft’”) in
Brockhaus and Efron’s Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1891–1907
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Rasutovi oli tyytyväinen, niin tyytyväinen kuin ikävää pelkäävä
ihminen voi olla päästyänsä viihtymyksen riemuun.
*****
*****
*****
———
Ristianilla oli ikävä. Lumi oli eristänyt hänet kylästä, ja aina yhtä
hiljaisina alkaneet päivät olivat uuvuttaneet hänet makailuun ja
laiskaan kääntelehtimiseen. Nekin reenjäljet olivat jo hävinneet
lumikatteisiin, jotka vielä viikko sitten kertoivat kartanolta lähteneistä
täyteläisistä kuormista ja eräästä arvoituksesta, jota Ristian oli
miettinyt monta päivää: muutamat Järvituitun syksyllä hevosensa
menettäneet miehet olivat pyssyt olalla tulleet nummistoon ja
sanoneet heillä olevan luvan viedä mitä tahtoivat; ja veivätkin,
Rasutovin hevosella ja reellä omiensa lisäksi vielä, usuttivatpa
Ristianiakin mukaansa muka uuteen elämään kerrassaan. Mutta
isännyyden ja lohien makuun päässyt Ristian jäi entisekseen
nummien saarrokseen muistelemaan Rasutovia ja kaikkea, mitä
hänelle oli tapahtunut haaraparran tultua Järvituittuun.
— Sinulle annan, ota, ota koko kala, muista minun antaneen, vai
otanko tupaan ja paistan sinulle? Ylen on rasvainen kala, on kuin
juhannuslahna, rasvainen ja selästä pehmeä.
— Mutta jos nyt jäivät herrat tulematta, niin kyllä kuollaan kuin
torakat kuivaan uuninraviin. Mistä otat silloin ruplan ja ruuan?
— Voi näyttää siltä, mutta voi toisellakin. Ampui tuo sama hätä
minunkin lävitseni silloin, kun liitti sänkyyn läsimään. Minä katselin
silloin asiat niin, että tällä ruoskalla ärsytetyllä vauhdilla ajetaan pian
notkoon, ellei muutosta tule. Ja ainahan ihmiset pelkäävät mustia
pilvenkiukamia, niin kauan kuin ne roikkuvat niskan päällä, mutta
sitten sateen mentyä katsovat ympärillensä kuin uutta maailmaa.
Minusta ei ole enää siivo eläjäksi, sillä en näillä ramaantuneilla
käsillä mahda maalle mitään, mutta jos nyt alkaisi ajella pellonselkiä
yhtä ahkerasti ja rapsakasti kuin maantien raiteita, niin itsestään
joutuisi uuteen elämään.