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Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era

2015-08-06_1706

Winner of the 2003 Norris Hundley Prize (Pacific Coast Branch , American Historical Association)
Honorable mention, 2003 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theater History and Cognate Studies American Society of Theatre Research)

An athlete becomes a movie star; a waiter rises to manage a chain of nightclubs; a movie scenarist takes to writing restaurant reviews. Intrepid women hunt bears, drive in automobile races, and fly, first in balloons and then in airplanes. Sensational crimes jump from city streets onto the screen almost before the pistols have had a chance to cool. Paris in the Twenties? Fitzgerald’s New York? Early Hollywood? No, tsarist Russia in the last decades before the Revolution.