The uncovering of experiential, subjective history through studies of the senses creates a strongly cohesive framework for this anthology of scholarship across three centuries of Russian history. The authors contribute to a growing field of sensory history going back to Alain Corbin's The Foul and the Fragrant (1986), and the more recent work of Mark M. Smith (especially Sensing the Past, 2007).
While the volume is structured chronologically, the chapters could also be organized by the five senses themselves (for instance, four authors focus upon taste). Yet it is the concept of “intersensorality”—Mark Smith's term for the confluence of the senses (257)—that emerges most powerfully to amplify the impact of these studies.
This confluence is most fully developed in two studies of the sensory bombardment of war (Laurie S. Stoff on nurses in WWI and Steven C. Jug on soldiers in WWII). Stoff shows that, given the particular circumstances of Russian nurses serving at, rather than behind, the front, these barely-trained women were subjected to the same traumas and violence as combat soldiers. The smells, sights and sounds of war, Jug argues, could never be embodied by the ideological rhetoric that was intended to inspire men to fight.
Taste and definitions of otherness form a unifying theme for chapters by Alison K. Smith, Aaron B. Retish, and Tricia Starks. Retish and Smith both show taste used for cultural exclusion—of the Finno-Ugric Udmurts by the Russians in Retish's study of the Udmurts’ favorite drink, kumyshka, and of the Russians by westerners in Smith's “Fermentation, taste, and identity.” Smith analyzes the dividing line between fermented and rotten foods as a cultural rather than biological distinction. Sour rye bread and fermented cabbage became off-putting markers of Russianness for foreigners to whom these foods were unpalatable. Starks, in contrast, describes the allure of otherness in the tastes of tobacco. She draws upon advertising imagery to show that Russian smokers inhaled not just nicotine, but also the associations of a Virginia or Turkish tobacco, including “sex, the Orient, and the Western world” (98). While Starks’ claim that the image of a female smoker (Figure 5.1) is Turkic seems misplaced (surely a feather headdress is more likely to indicate Native American?), she effectively places Russian smoking within its global framework of trade and consumption. Similar to distinctions of identity in these studies of taste, Matthew Romaniello uses touch (or the concept of “hapticity”) to show how eighteenth-century west European visitors went beyond the pure physicality of Russia's cold to define the whole culture as “phlegmatic,” which explained to them why the Russian people seemed cold and melancholic.
Attempts to modify patterns of consumption through sight and taste (culinary and aesthetic) concern both Abby Schrader's chapter on the opening of the Passazh shopping center in imperial St. Petersburg as well as Anton Masterovoy's discussion of Soviet campaigns to change diets during food shortages. Neither turned out as planned, as the elegance of the Passazh blurred the lines between respectable women and prostitutes, while repeated Soviet efforts to promote soy over sausage in times of hardship only heightened popular associations between meat and well-being.
Claire Shaw's “Deafness and the Politics of Hearing” examines the experience of those lacking a sense within Soviet society. While Soviet policy represented a great improvement over pre-revolutionary law, which had equated deafness with insanity, the Bolsheviks still saw deafness as a condition to be overcome in order to be fully Soviet. Rather than employing sign language as a form of resistance to this perception, the deaf community incorporated Soviet rhetoric into their signing as a marker of their own inclusion.
In the book's last section on memorializing the Soviet past, Adrienne Harris convincingly explains why, above other victims of Nazi cruelty, Zoia Kosmodemianskaia became an icon of Soviet WWII sacrifice due to the power of visual and auditory memory. Finally, Tim Harte examines the emphasis on smell in the films of Aleksei German as a metaphor of decay within the Stalinist system.
A review of this brevity cannot do justice to the arguments and rich use of sources in these eleven chapters. They draw Russian history into a field that, as Alexander Martin notes in the introduction, “endows the study of the past with a visceral sense of immediacy” (16).
