Epics of Everyday Life - Softcover

Susan Richards

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140120483 ISBN 13: 9780140120486

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd, 1991

Synopsis

Susan Richards, a Russian scholar, has travelled to Russia and talked to ordinary Russian people about their lives and how they perceive the changes which have been made under Gorbachev's rule - if, indeed, anything has changed. She explores the Soviet people through the prism of perestroika, to see how they and their country are coming to terms with the past and how they are beginning to conceive a different future for themselves.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

After extended stays in the U.S.S.R. between fall '88 and summer '90, Richards, a British film producer, here presents one of the gloomiest pictures in memory. With an obvious talent for ingratiating herself, she got herself invited to share the apartments of natives she met casually in Moscow, Baku, Novosibirk and Kiev. Conventional wisdom throughout that vast land, according to the author, decrees the problems of perestroika to be intractable, and although fears of repression are gone, "everything else is the same": with everybody on the fiddle, people resist reforms that threaten to topple private "arrangements" for supplying individual needs ("Nobody talks of buying, only procuring"). Richards recalls with affection those who welcomed her into their homes, while presenting herself here as a sometimes difficult houseguest who often "did not understand what was going on." And although she has much of interest to say, so tiresomely does she intrude herself into the tale that few readers are likely to be as indulgent of her as her hosts were.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Richards, a British filmmaker and scholar of Russian literature, set out to discover Russia (between 1988 and 1990) without the backing of a news organization or prearranged contracts with the elite. The result: an unusually thoughtful glimpse at the substance of life in such diverse locales as Dagestan, Baku, and Novosibirsk, presented in a likable, well-written narrative. While covering much of the same ground traversed in Francine du Plessix Gray's Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope ( LJ 2/15/90), this less elite-oriented book takes a harder look at people living on the edge: farmers trying to break out of the collective; Old Believers trying to worship; unofficial actors trying to put on their shows. For informed readers.
- Robert Decker, Los Angeles
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140120483
• ISBN 13: 9780140120486
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384