Political animal : : representing dogs in modern Russian culture / / by Henrietta Mondry.

• Superior document: Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics, Volume 59
• VerfasserIn: Mondry, Henrietta,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, Netherlands ;, Boston, [Massachusetts] : : Brill Rodopi,, 2015.; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Series: Studies in Slavic literature and poetics ; Volume 59.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (451 pages) :; color illustrations, photographs.
• Notes: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
• Other title: Preliminary material /; Introduction /; When dogs were more expensive than people /; ‘The Children’s Hour’: Cruelty to dogs /; Degradation narratives: Dogs and humans in social and moral transformation /; The fate of dogs in partnerships with the marginalised Other /; Dogs and inmates in prison and Gulags: Writing and re-writing the humanistic canon /; Dogs and their masters in police and prison service: 1960s-1980s /; The cult of the border guard dogs /; The hunter’s dog as hunted: White Bim Black Ear as the cult event of the Stagnation Era, 1970s-1980s /; Transformation narratives: physical, metaphysical, scientific /; Sleeping with the animal: boundary crossing in life and art (from pre-Revolutionary modernism to post-Soviet postmodernism) /; Conclusion: Dogs are ‘good to think’ /; Bibliography /; Index /
• Bibliography: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• ISBN: 9401211841
• ISSN: 0169-0175
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: by Henrietta Mondry.

This book is the first interdisciplinary study of the representation of dogs in Russian discourse since the nineteenth century. Focusing on the correlation between humans and dogs in traditional belief systems, in literature, film and other cultural productions, it shows that the dog as a political construct incorporates various contradictions, with different representations investing the dog with multiple, often-paradoxical meanings – moral, social and philosophical. From the peasantry’s dislike of the gentry’s hunting dogs and children’s cruelty to dogs in Pushkin and Dostoevsky to the establishment of the Soviet dynasties of border guard and police dogs, from Pavlov’s laboratory dogs to the monuments to the cosmic dog Laika and the subversive dog impersonations by the contemporary performance artist Oleg Kulik, the book explores the intersections of species-class-gender-sexuality-race-disability and, paradoxically, of Arcadian and Utopian dreams and scientific deeds. This study contributes to the unfolding cultural history of human-animal relations across cultures.