Haunted Dreams (Cornell University Press, March 2022), by Jenny Kaminer, associate professor of Russian, is the first in-depth study of the representation of post-Soviet adolescence in fiction, film and drama. The book maps how the adolescent hero has become a locus for multiple anxieties throughout the tumultuous years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Kaminer is an interdisciplinary scholar of Russian culture whose publications have encompassed a broad range of historical epochs—from the nineteenth century to the present day—as well as genres and media, including, drama, prose, film, and television. She established her reputation within the field of Slavic Studies as a specialist in gender and Russian culture, the representation of maternity in particular. Her first book, Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture (Northwestern UP, 2014), received the Heldt Prize for Best Book in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Gender Studies.

For the past eight years, her research has primarily focused on Russian culture since 1991, exploring the profound transformations of post-Soviet Russian society through a multidisciplinary prism. As in her earlier work on motherhood and Russian culture across several centuries, she employs a cultural-historical approach that allows the exploration of the central question recurring throughout my scholarship: how do dominant cultural myths mutate—or, alternatively, remain constant—during periods of pronounced societal change?

View the book at Cornell University Press