Authors

Carlotta Chenoweth¹;  ¹ United States Military Academy, United States

Discussion

Since the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukraine, the politics of the Russian state have turned still further to the right, embracing so-called “traditional values.” On the cultural front, countless television stations, film studios, publishing houses, and so on, have released new works that have adopted the party line. However, the party line, so to speak, has not been realized as one coherent artistic movement: contemporary Russian art endorsed by the state is no more monolithic than the Socialist Realism that came before it.

This paper will consider one of these new cultural works: a magazine launched in 2022 called Prababoushka, founded and edited by Moscow socialite Maria Sevostyanova. Prababoushka, in the words of its editors, is a “connection between generations, a wise guide between the past and the present…the return of a lost identity. It is love for [our] native culture, traditional values, and aristocratic aesthetics.” Unlike mama (who came of age during Perestroika) or babushka (presumably a communist), Prababoushka represents, to women of a certain age, an imagined Russia before the Revolution: “Having tea by the samovar…Music that beats in unison with your heart. The library inherited from your grandfather. A volume [tomik] of Pushkin’s poetry.” In this magazine, the editors write, “For everyone there’s something of our own [svoё].”

Prababoushka interweaves an obsession with “aristocratic aesthetics” with the more modern occupation of launching a lifestyle brand: hosting lectures, dinners, and events sponsored by major state-run cultural institutions and launching pop-up shops where one can acquire high-end accoutrement targeted to the Moscow elite. They lend their readers instructions on such things as how to set the table, what nineteenth century literature to read, or which flowers to plant in the garden of one’s country estate. On social media, a community of dedicated readers share luscious tea settings, quotes from Evgenii Onegin, snapshots from etiquette classes, and pre-revolutionary antiques of all varieties. 

I will demonstrate in this paper how Prababoushka offers, to a certain class of Russian women, a nostalgic alternative to the Western-facing lifestyle that the wealthy have hitherto enjoyed in the Putin era. It proffers both a fantasy and a community for like-minded women who may, after February of 2022, be unable to fly at a moment’s notice to Sardinia or the French Riviera. In its obsession to detail, Prababoushka directs its reader to participate in a kind of surreal cosplay – one that is disconnected from reality yet carefully attuned to current political demands. In summary, I will address how nostalgia and performance – through the example of Prababoushka – have come to shape Moscow-based cultural production and identity.