***** Red Stars: Personality and the Soviet Popular Song, 1955-1991 David MacFadyen
The history of Soviet popular song since 1955 is traced through the careers of seven famous performers.
Cloth 0773521062 Release date: 2001-03-29 CA $55.00 | US $44.95 | UK £30.50 336pp photos
Subjects: Cultural Studies, East European Studies, Musicology, Popular Culture
Red Stars tells the story of seven singers; Edita P'ekha, Iosif Kobzon, Lev Leshchenko, Sofiia Rotaru, Valerii Leont'ev, Alla Pugacheva, and Irina Ponarovskaia. Their songs, broadcast on Soviet radio every day for decades and sometimes selling hundreds of millions of copies, tell the story of Soviet popular culture since the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Collectively the seven embody the efforts of a generation to fashion a new worldview.
David MacFadyen delves into influential and widely disseminated songs that had a profound social significance in the Soviet Union. He discusses each singer's life, showing what it was that made them famous while placing the differences in their careers and fame in the context of Soviet culture as a whole.
MacFadyen's multi-layered study considers national identity, gender, and the development of individual celebrity in a socialist state. He also looks at whether it is possible for artists to achieve genuine self-expression in a public arena under continuous political scrutiny. Both bold and penetrating, MacFadyen reveals a part of the Soviet Union that, while touching millions of people, has remained almost completely unexamined.
Review quotes "An original, well-informed, and beautifully written overview of post-Stalinist culture. MacFadyen draws together a wealth of material and presents it in a meaningful, lucid way. His command over the vast body of information on which he draws is impressive and enables the reader to connect in a significant way with what might otherwise have been an embarrassment of riches." Olga Hasty, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University
David MacFadyen is associate professor of Russian studies at Dalhousie University and the author of two books on Joseph Brodsky. He is currently at work on two more books on the Russian popular song.
<http://www.mqup.mcgill.ca/book.php?bookid=1185> *****
David MacFadyen, _Songs for Fat People: Affect, Emotion, and Celebrity in the Russian Popular Song, 1900-1955_ (2002): <http://www.mqup.mcgill.ca/browse_archives.php?catalogue=4&page=27>
David MacFadyen, _Estrada?! Grand Narratives and the Philosophy of the Russian Popular Song since Perestroika_ (2002): <http://www.mqup.mcgill.ca/book.php?bookid=483>
David MacFadyen: <http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/slavic/faculty/macfadyen_d.html> -- Yoshie
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