Haunted Dreams

Haunted Dreams is the first comprehensive study in English devoted to cultural representations of adolescence in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Jenny Kaminer situates these cultural representations within the broader context of European and Anglo-American scholarship on adolescence and youth, and she explores how Russian writers, dramatists, and filmmakers have repeatedly turned to the adolescent protagonist in exploring the myriad fissures running through post-Soviet society.

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.

Jenny Kaminer is Associate Professor of Russian at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Women with a Thirst for Destruction.

Haunted Dreams is not only an important foundational book on literary, cinematic, and dramatic responses to adolescence in Russia, it is also timely. [...] This book is singularly well written and argued, as well as eminently readable.

With elegant, engaging prose, Haunted Dreams is a major academic accomplishment and a valuable reference point for subsequent studies of post-Soviet, and indeed global, adolescence.

Jenny Kaminer's excellent new book, Haunted Dreams, turns our attention to fantasies of adolescence in post-Soviet culture by assembling an archive of literature, film, drama, and television in which the adolescent—that awkward state between childhood and adulthood—is made visible as a cultural construct.

Jenny Kaminer's Haunted Dreams provides an excellent examination of contemporary Russian cultural productions featuring young people across diverse popular genres. She reinforces her discussions with sophisticated presentations of historical contexts and comparative analyses of primary sources.

For students and scholars of youth studies, this book is an essential starting place. The lucid and succinct descriptions of film and drama, in particular the cinematic oeuvre of Anna Melikian, understudied until now, nestle these contemporary works neatly within the Slavic Studies field through approaches that continue to be of interest.

A profound and multi-faceted analysis, a deep insight into Russian culture. In light of the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops, the importance of engaging with the discussions and conclusions initiated by Kaminer's book becomes ever more necessary.

Larissa V. Rudova, Pomona College, coeditor of Russian Children's Literature and Culture:

Haunted Dreams is the first in-depth study of the representation of post-Soviet adolescence in fiction, film, and drama. Besides being theoretically sophisticated, this book is highly readable and engaging. For anybody interested in the formation of post-Soviet Russian identity, this book is a must.

Sara Pankenier Weld, University of California, Santa Barbara, author of Voiceless Vanguard:

Based on a range of little-studied contemporary materials that are worthy of critical attention, Haunted Dreams is also grounded in historical antecedents and draws on relevant scholarship from a variety of fields. From the opening to the conclusion, it feels highly pertinent to the contemporary moment, yet also employs a scholarly approach that ensures its material will continue to prove meaningful in the future.