How cultural history books are written: from special case to general patterns

The article analyzes the content, structure, and concepts of Igor V. Narskii's monograph on choreographic amateurism in the USSR, focusing on his use of “cultural history” as a research strategy. Narskii’s work presents amateur art as a successful state project that also became an important component of the leisure time of Soviet people of several generations, practices of their self-realization, building their “worlds of their own”. To support his argument, Narskii draws on a variety of sources, including official documents, specialized printed publications, materials of initiative documentation, as well as memories of his own Soviet experience of participating in amateur art. Although the work is divided into three parts, according to the number of “actors” involved in creating and implementing the state project (the state, professional choreographers, and amateur artists), the narrative is complex and includes individual sources from which numerous individual plots, interrupted by lyrical digressions and the author's personal recollections, are drawn. Narskii also incorporates a diverse range of concepts, from Michel de Certeau's theory of “fruitful poaching” and Claude Lévi-Strauss's theory of bricolage to Alexei Yurchak's concept of “inauthenticity”. Overall, the research and narrative strategies used by Narskii represent an original, fruitful and interesting experience of creating a work within the framework of the historical-cultural paradigm, although it does not exhaust all possibilities within this framework.