In Search оf the True Russia

Russia's provinces have long held a prominent place in the nation's cultural imagination. Lyudmila Parts looks at the contested place of the provinces in twenty-first-century Russian literature and popular culture addressing notions of nationalism authenticity Orientalism Occidentalism and postimperial identity. Surveying a largely unexplored body of Russian journalism literature and film from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries Parts finds that the harshest portrayals of the provinces arise within high culture. Popular culture however has increasingly turned from the newly prosperous multiethnic and westernized Moscow to celebrate the hinterlands as repositories of national traditions and moral strength. This change she argues has directed debate about Russia's identity away from its loss of imperial might and global prestige and toward a hermetic national identity based on the opposition of us vs. us rather than us vs. them. She offers an intriguing analysis of the contemporary debate over what it means to be Russian and where true Russians reside.