Recently we saw a splash of headlines about the Russian Covid-19 vaccine, as Russia became the first country to register a vaccine and governmental officials shared plans for starting mass vaccinations in October. This news was shared all over my social media, with the commentary hewing to repetitive jokes, the humor value of which was based on an implied shared …
At the heart of this ethnography are two stories of my informants, Ekaterina and Marina, who live in the countryside, in Karelia (a province in north-west Russia) and have various chronic diseases. The age of Ekaterina is 75 years; Marina is 84. All names in these ethnographic accounts are anonymized. Conversations with informants took place over the phone so as …
In Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia (Duke University Press, 2018), Tomas Matza traces the landscape of “psy” disciplines, practices, and institutions across postsocialist Saint Petersburg. Writing with a distinctive conceptual subtlety and care, Matza pushes beyond a range of well-established interpretations to examine the multiple ways in which psychotherapy has provided tools for people to understand …
Vakas is a Russian man in his 30s with a traumatic brain injury acquired during childhood. He spends most of his days in his room in his family apartment. Occasionally, he convinces his parents to let him go out. Or, he tricks them and slips away when his mother is at work or his father isn’t paying attention. Vakas is …
Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science
Oxford University Press, 2014. 880 pages.
It is going to be difficult for reviewers to avoid clichés about this wonderful biography – and wonderful it is, as both a work of scholarship and as a highly readable story of a truly ‘Russian life in science’. Some basic things …