Acknowledgments
This volume consists of essays that I wrote from 2000 to 2022. During my fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, IWM) in Vienna in the spring of 2023, I had the time and resources necessary to prepare them for publication. I am grateful to the Institute and to Ivan Krastev in particular for their support during this time.
It would be impossible to mention here everyone who read, commented, and critiqued the various versions of the articles included in this volume. But I would like to acknowledge two institutions that profoundly shaped my intellectual orientation. As a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, I was taught to take theory seriously, yet never uncritically. I was encouraged to experiment with conceptual frameworks and interpretive models without losing touch with historical facts and ethnographic communities, which these concepts and models aspired to explain. At Princeton, I benefited enormously from an unusually interdisciplinary setting that became my professional home. Equally split between the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Anthropology, I slowly learned how to be legible to the audiences that spoke different professional languages, valued different research methods, and prioritized different scholarly formats. I am deeply indebted to my colleagues for their interest and generosity, and, most crucially, for their willingness to accept my incomplete belonging to their respective disciplinary fields.
Several of my chapters have appeared in earlier publications, and I am thankful for the journals for the possibility to reproduce them in this volume: “The Quantity of Style: Imaginary Consumption in the New Russia” (Theory, Culture and Society, 2000, Vol. 17 (5): 97–120); “Crimes of Substitution: Detection and the Late Soviet Society” (Public Culture, 2003, Vol. 15 (3): 426–452); “The Flexible and the Pliant: Disturbed Organisms of Soviet Modernity” (Cultural Anthropology, 2004, Vol. 19 (3): 392–428); “Aesthetics Without Law: Cinematic Bandits in Post-Soviet Space” (Slavic and East European Journal, 2007, Vol. 51 (2): 357–390); “ ‘We’re Nostalgic but We’re Not Crazy’: Retrofitting the Past in Russia” (The Russian Review, 2007, Vol. 66 (3): 451–482); “Totality Decomposed: Objectalizing Late Socialism in Post-Soviet Biochronicles” (The Russian Review, 2010, Vol. 69 (4): 638–669); “Remembering in Public: On the Affective Management of History” (Ab Imperio, 2013, Vol. 1: 269–302); “ ‘Against the Cult of Things’: On Soviet Productivism, Storage Economy, and Commodities with No Destination” (The Russian Review 2014, Vol. 73 (2): 198–236).
Finally, I would like to thank Sebastian Budgen and Danny Hayward from the Historical Materialism book series. Without their engaged interest and support, this project would most likely have never materialized.