Lot's Wife And The Venus Of Milo: Conflicting Attitudes To The Cultural Heritage In Modern Russia
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
In the turbulent intellectual landscape of modern Russia, two powerful symbols collide: Lot's Wife — frozen, backward-looking, paralysed by the past — and the Venus de Milo, the embodiment of classical Western beauty and cultural aspiration. Boris Thomson's Lot's Wife and the Venus of Milo argues that these competing icons encapsulate a profound and unresolved tension at the heart of Russian cultural identity: whether to venerate and preserve inherited tradition or to radically break with it in pursuit of revolutionary renewal. Drawing on a rich array of literary, artistic, and philosophical sources, Thomson chronicles the fierce ideological battles that shaped Soviet and post-revolutionary cultural life, mapping the fault lines between conservatives and iconoclasts, between heritage and erasure. Thomson writes with the precision of a scholar and the conviction of a cultural critic, illuminating how Russia's relationship with its own past has never been merely academic — it has been existential. The book presents a sweeping intellectual history that connects figures from Pushkin to the Soviet avant-garde, illustrating how the question of cultural inheritance became a battleground for the very soul of a nation. Rigorous, thought-provoking, and elegantly constructed, this work leaves the reader asking whether any society can truly escape the petrifying gaze of its own history.
Author: Boris Thomson
Format: Hardback
Genre: European history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
In the turbulent intellectual landscape of modern Russia, two powerful symbols collide: Lot's Wife — frozen, backward-looking, paralysed by the past — and the Venus de Milo, the embodiment of classical Western beauty and cultural aspiration. Boris Thomson's Lot's Wife and the Venus of Milo argues that these competing icons encapsulate a profound and unresolved tension at the heart of Russian cultural identity: whether to venerate and preserve inherited tradition or to radically break with it in pursuit of revolutionary renewal. Drawing on a rich array of literary, artistic, and philosophical sources, Thomson chronicles the fierce ideological battles that shaped Soviet and post-revolutionary cultural life, mapping the fault lines between conservatives and iconoclasts, between heritage and erasure. Thomson writes with the precision of a scholar and the conviction of a cultural critic, illuminating how Russia's relationship with its own past has never been merely academic — it has been existential. The book presents a sweeping intellectual history that connects figures from Pushkin to the Soviet avant-garde, illustrating how the question of cultural inheritance became a battleground for the very soul of a nation. Rigorous, thought-provoking, and elegantly constructed, this work leaves the reader asking whether any society can truly escape the petrifying gaze of its own history.