Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture

In Russian culture, the archetypal mother is noble and self-sacrificing. In Women with a Thirst for Destruction, however, Jenny Kaminer shows how this image is destabilized during periods of dramatic rupture in Russian society, examining in detail the aftermath of three key moments in the countrys history: the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the fall of the Communist regime in 1991. She explores works both familiar and relatively unexamined: Leo Tolstoys Anna Karenina, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrins The Golovlev Family, Fyodor Gladkovs Cement, and Liudmila Petrushevskaias The Time: Night, as well as a late Soviet film (Vyacheslav Krishtofovichs Adams Rib, 1990) and media coverage of the Chechen conflict. Kaminers book speaks broadly to the mutability of seemingly established cultural norms in the face of political and social upheaval. See more