Petro-Culture in Russia: From Oil Products to Literary Products
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13135/2281-6658/4035Keywords:
Petrofiction, Energy Humanities, Contemporary Russian Literature, Isaak Babel’, Dmitrij BykovAbstract
This essay explores the cultural meaning and social significance of oil in Soviet and post-Soviet Russian culture through the analysis of two literary case studies. The first is a story written by I. Babel in 1934; the second is authored by D. Bykov and was published in 2017. Both are entitled Neft’ (Oil). The analysis follows the notion expressed in Bruno Latour’s Politics of nature (1999) which regards oil as a “miracle-product” of our time with potentially nefarious consequences. From the anthropocentric optimism of the Soviet era to the present-day sense that oil has become an uncontrollable “object”, this hybrid of nature and culture holds a significant and diverse place in Russian literature.Downloads
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors keep the copyrights for their work and give the journal the work’s first publication copyright, which is at the same time licensed under a Creative Commons License – Attribution, which in turn allows other parties to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
Content Licence
You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and to adapt the work. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
Metadata licence
CoSMo published articles metadata are dedicated to the public domain by waiving all publisher's rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.
You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.
