“Everyday Life is Broken”: Early Soviet Literature about Transformations in the Sphere of Leisure during the Civil War

• Main Author: Svetlana Borisovna Ulyanova
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: Ural Federal University Press 2018-10-01
• Series: Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки
• Online Access: https://journals.urfu.ru/index.php/Izvestia2/article/view/3423

This article considers the history of leisure during the Civil War in Russia. The author analyses the significance of the Soviet literature of the 1920s as a historical source for the study of everyday life. The author relies on methodological approaches of leisure history as a part of Alltagsgeschichte and makes a historiographical review a number of everyday life issues, i.e. the living conditions; changes in the chronotope of post-revolutionary leisure; studying of violence, different excesses, etc. The analysis of changes in the field of leisure is based on works of fiction of some contemporaries and participants of the Civil War (A. Marienhof, A. Tolstoy, N. Lyashko, etc.). The author formulates an essential condition for the effective use of literary texts in historical research which means studying them in a broader historiographical and social context. The paper examines various factors underlying the spreading of deviant leisure practices (drug abuse, gambling, etc.) in the period of the Civil War, the impact of the post-­revolutionary socio-political transformation on the everyday lives of citizens. The overall radicalisation during the Revolution and the Civil War profoundly changed people’s behaviour patterns and, among others, their leisure models. The fragility of existence, the disintegration of “strong ties” (in families and at work) contributed to the spreading of deviant leisure activities. However, there was no qualitative shift in traditional leisure culture. At the same time, it is possible to observe a reallocation of time among different types of antisocial behavior, a reduced number of resources and changing urban topography of deviant leisure between 1918 and 1922.