Chronicles in Stone

Chronicles in Stone is a study of the powerful and pervasive myth of the Russian Northwest, its role in forming Soviet and Russian identities, and its impact on local communities. Combining detailed archival research, participant observation and oral history work, it explores the transformation of three northwestern Russian towns from provincial backwaters into the symbolic homelands of the Soviet and Russian nations.

The book's central argument is that the Soviet state exploited the cultural heritage of the Northwest to craft patriotic narratives of the people's genius, heroism and strength that could bind the nation together after 1945. Through sustained engagement with local voices, it reveals the ways these narratives were internalized, revised, and resisted by the communities living in the region.

Donovan provides an alternative lens through which to view the rise of Russian patriotic consciousness in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, adding a valuable regional dimension to our knowledge of Russian nation building and identity politics.

Victoria Donovan is a Senior Lecturer in Russian and Director of the Centre for Russian, Soviet, Central and East European Studies at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of research articles in Antropologicheskii forum, Slavic Review, Slavonica and Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. She is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award holder.

Whereas studies of such topics underscore the rupture of 1991, Victoria Donovan's monograph emphasizes the continuities of the postwar Soviet society in the present. Her book is part of a recent trend in historical scholarship to investigate the protection, preservation, and restoration of cultural heritage in state socialism societies.

[Donovan] skillfully weaves her rich and detailed discussion of local dynamics into the national context of the past and present.

Chronicles in Stone tells us a great deal, not only about patriotism and the imagined nation but also of how historical memory is curated by regional actors, as well as the struggles and deal-making between the political centre and the periphery.

Victoria Donovan's book on preservation, architecture, and regional identity in Northwest Russia provides a useful corrective to works that have looked at the attempts to preserve medieval and folk Russian architecture as an episode mainly in Russian nationalism and chauvinism.

Edith W. Clowes, University of Virginia, coeditor of Area Studies in the Global Age:

What makes this study so valuable is that it combines a number of methodologies in fruitful ways—ethnography, oral history, architectural history, and cultural studies/ cultural anthropology. With these tools Victoria Donovan has managed to answer difficult questions, particularly about the Soviet roots of Russia's current wave of ultranationalism.

Karl D. Qualls, author of From Ruins to Reconstruction:

This study is highly original, timely, and important. The Putin Administration has used history selectively to create new national narratives and forge patriotic unity. Donovan shows that this has been a process with a history of its own.