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Speakers): Emma Widdis, Cambridge University

A 'sensory history' is a crucial counterpart to the recent 'emotional turn' in Russian and Slavic scholarship on Russian and Slavic history and culture. In particular, the Soviet revolutionary project was a unique attempt to create new models of human experience to correspond to the new political order – an attempt to shape sensory experience itself. This paper will explore how the still-young medium of cinema became a privileged site for the investigation of new, intensified, models of sensory perception, for the working out of the problematic relationship between the body, the mind and the world that had such ideological potency in early Soviet Russia.

 

EMMA WIDDIS is Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (2003), and Alexander Medvedkin (2004). Her recent work addresses different dimensions of a cultural history of the senses in Soviet Russia, with a particular focus on the status of touch. With film at its centre, but also exploring broader debates on home decoration, clothing, and manufacture, this project directs attention to the importance of touch, of sensory pleasure, across diverse aspects of the Soviet discursive field, to trace the evolution of competing models of Soviet 'feeling' and 'sensation'.