The Firebird and the Fox Navigate a Cultural Ecosystem

Jeffrey Brooks, “The Firebird and the Fox Navigate a Cultural Ecosystem.” Brooks will consider the notion of an inclusive cultural ecosystem in which participants interact in mutuality. This approach highlights the connectivity, exchange, and reciprocated influence among the constituent parts of the system. It also emphasizes the impact of the cultural actors’ shared exposure to evolving social, political, and economic circumstances, and the interactiveness of innovation in form and content. Varied materials from folklore and popular communications to the most complex and erudite works are considered to show the agency of writers and readers (and their counterparts in other cultural media) at all levels of society. Although the evolving culture was by nature and structure inclusive (due to mutual interaction of the contributors), the tension between inclusion and exclusion within society more broadly recurred as an elemental theme in works of literature and art. The topic surfaced in many and disparate works that probed changing boundaries: between the Self and the Other; the Russian and the foreigner; and even the shifting boundary of the audience for culture. The presentation will draw from the forthcoming The Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture Under Tsars and Bolsheviks (Cambridge University Press).