Haunted Dreams

ENG:

Through close analysis of prose, drama, television, and film, this book maps how the adolescent hero has become a locus for multiple anxieties throughout the tumultuous years since the end of the Soviet experiment. Kaminer also directly addresses some of the pivotal questions facing scholars of post-Soviet Russia: Have Soviet cultural models been transcended? Or do they continue to dominate? The figure of the adolescent, an especially potent and enduring source of cultural mythology throughout the Soviet years, provides provocative material for exploring these questions.

In Haunted Dreams, Kaminer employs a historical approach to reveal how fantasies of adolescence have mutated and remained constant across the Soviet/post-Soviet divide, focusing on violence, temporality, and gender and the body. Some of the works discussed present the possibility of salvaging the model of the heroic adolescent for a new society. Others, by contrast, relegate this figure to the dustbin of history by evoking disgust or horror, or by unmasking the tragic consequences that ensue from the combination of adolescence, violence, and fantasy.

RUS:

В своей книге Дженни Каминер показывает, почему именно подросток - неустойчивый, ранимый, склонный к бунту — стал ключевой фигурой в осмыслении тревожной, противоречивой реальности постсоветской эпохи. Сравнивая российский материал с западными подходами к изучению молодежи, автор вписывает свое исследование в широкий международный контекст.

Каминер исследует тему на материале прозы, кино, театра и телевидения. В одних произведениях подросток предстает как