Karen Petrone

With this effort to tease out what the Great War meant to the Russian psyche Petrone examines how, on one hand, Russian memory moved in comparable patterns to memory in the societies of the other European combatants in the effort to assimilate and rise above the horror of the whole experience. On the other, there is the matter of the Soviet regime trying to shove an unmasterable past into the closet, with the effort to make a clean break of the Tsarist experience, until the need emerged to create a new Great Russian patriotism which could be used to motivate Soviet soldiers in the forthcoming Great Patriotic War. Much of this work is an examination of the post-1917 literary output of the participants, but there is also a consideration of the contemporary ongoing struggle to meaningfully incorporate all memory in the public realm, though the apparent synthesis would be that of the "safe" Russian patriotism created in the '40s with a stronger reintegration of Orthodox religion; "And Quiet Flows the Don" might be the great Russian novel of World War I but there is still little love for the "White" movement in contemporary Russia.… (mais)