Book Review: Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales by Bronwyn Reddan

Abstract

teenage conscripts? Or was it about a certain demographic of Slavic men in power in the government and media (and even perhaps among film audiences) fussing over the changing world in the sixties that challenged them? Jeff Sahadeo has recently published research on the migration of men from the Caucasus and Central Asia into Moscow and Leningrad from the 1960s to the 1980s and beyond, who often sought to support families in their home republics. When paired with Dumančić’s work, this history potentially offers us a fuller portrait of Slavic men’s urban malaise and sense of crisis—influenced not only by the new modernity or by perceptions of (Slavic) women’s consumerism, but by the increasing visibility of Muslim men in central Soviet cities. More research on the film intersections between masculinity and nationality would be welcome. Men Out of Focus is an excellent contribution to Soviet cultural history and film studies that enriches each of the many fields it touches. The epilogue points to several administrative changes after 1969 that decreased the independence of the Soviet film industry, providing a clear path for where future researchers might follow the sixties man. “Post-Stalinist celluloid heroes,” Dumančić concludes, “now had a sense of autonomy, yet they also seemed unable to assert themselves in a world where preschoolers and pre-teens exercised a monopoly on morality, young men fulminated against their father’s (Stalinist) sins, mass consumerism had made women the dominant economic actors, and science offered more questions than answers” (255). The book is accessibly written (including smooth and easily digestible descriptions of dozens of films), meticulously researched, and it offers new ways of thinking about the postwar and post-Stalin eras—which will perhaps now become known more broadly in Soviet history as “the sixties,” thanks to this important book.