Soviet Hegemony of Form: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 3 (45), July 2003. I was initially clued into this book after watching Hypernormalization and reading the surrounding interviews Adam Curtis gave in support of the film. He explicitly references this book and some of its general concepts, such as the normalizaiton of specifically reproduced authoritarian language and the performative/constative elements of behavior in regards to this era. This book was a bit hard to get into at first. The linguistic and philosophical foundation of the analysis was not familiar and it was hard getting through the first two chapters as a non-expert reader. The rest of the book, built on those initial foundations, however, was really good. The history of the collapse of the Soviet Union as detailed by the power of and use of words was really fascinating. The book is interesting and debatable, however, it was incredibly difficult to read. The author, for some reason that I don't understand, has chosen a very complicated way of conveying his ideas to the readers.

Esmerine now shares Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More, its seventh full-length album and first in five years. The band surprise-dropped the full album digitally on 06 May 2022, with the CD and Deluxe 180gram LP editions hitting stores on official release date 26 August 2022. After six stately albums, Esmerine now shares Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More, its first in five years. The band surprise-dropped the full album digitally on 06 May 2022, with the CD and deluxe 180gram LP editions hitting stores on official release date 26 August 2022. Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category—things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book—it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union—it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art."—Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes

In Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, Alexei Yurchak sets out to uncover why Soviet citizens were prepared for the Union’s collapse despite believing that it could never happen. Eschewing binary models, the author argues that all discourse is comprised of two dimensions: a constative one that describes reality and a performative one that transforms it and introduces new effects into the world. Following Stalin’s death in the 1950s, Soviet discourse shifted to emphasize the performative, rather than the constative, element, which meant that “discourse became powerfully constitutive of Soviet reality but no longer necessarily described that reality”. People thus understood the requirement to reproduce forms, which gave the appearance that they were obsequious to Soviet discourse, yet were able to disconnect meanings from these forms because the constative aspects did not have to conform to any standards, a process that Yurchak refers to as “deterritorialization”. Thus, while the constant reproduction of forms led individuals to perceive an unending system, they were prepared for new ideologies because they had been creating new meanings since the late 1950s. The author does not, however, conceptualize this as resistance, but instead as a process of being both within and outside the system simultaneously. Thus an individual could possess a strong belief in communism, yet also enjoy “bourgeois” or “western” products because the emphasis on the form (rather than content) of regime decrees permitted them to ignore the potentially contradictory elements of such beliefs. The strength of Yurchak's study is in its methodological-analytical grasp of the seemingly contradictory nature of everyday existence. . . . Yurchak provides an elegant methodological tool to explore the complex, intersecting and often paradoxical nature of social change."—Luahona Ganguly, International Journal of Communication Recorded and mixed at Lost River, Lascelles and the Rigaud Ranch, Quebec from November 2020 to April 2021. Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category—things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book—it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union—it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." —Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

Amidst these prolix transformations in Russian language and civilization, Yurchak's contribution has come in the form of a deep listening. ---Bruce Grant, Slavic Review Past Winners of the ASEEES Vucinich Book Prize". aseees.org. Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies . Retrieved 9 July 2023.

Research

a b "Alexei Yurchak | Anthropology". anthropology.berkeley.edu. University of California, Berkeley . Retrieved 9 July 2023.

Postsocialist Studies, Cultures of Parody and American Stiob,” Anthropology News, November 2008 (with Dominic Boyer) My extensive experience of book reviewing says that there are resonant topics, there are those that most leave indifferent, but if this is a nonfiction about the late Soviet period, then there will be a response. Both supporters of the Union and its haters will scold the author of the review along with the author of the book. People don't read books, but anyone who lived in those days sees himself as an expert on them. Therefore, I will explain: I have read the work of Alexey Yurchak and am telling about it not in search of dubious popularity, but out of the need to understand today's day This ambitious book admirably combines a new theoretical approach with detailed ethnographic materials. Written in a clear and engaging style, it is both thorough and precise, and provides a new and convincing insight that will definitely be central to all serious discussions of Soviet-type systems for years to come—namely, that the shift in Soviet life from a semantic to a pragmatic model of ideological discourse served to undermine the ideological system."—Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge, author of The Unmaking of Soviet Life Privatize Your Name: Symbolic Work in a Post-Soviet Linguistic Market” - Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3 (4), 2000. As a newcomer to this type of academic cultural commentary, some of the arguments Yurchak proposes in this book were probably a bit more novel to me than the average reader; This is really my only point of reference into this world so if what he is saying is really misguided I wouldn't know.Lccn 2004042384 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Old_pallet IA13736 Openlibrary_edition