The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

Haunted Dreams aims to "facilitate the historicization of contemporary Russian fantasies of adolescence" (3) while simultaneously addressing their Soviet legacy (7). The book declares itself to be "about the fantasies that adolescents have inspired in Russia since 1991 and how those fantasies have featured prominently in selected cultural works" (4). To accomplish this goal, Jenny Kaminer analyzes representations of adolescence in literature, film, and drama.

The book is organized into four chapters, preceded by an introduction and followed by a brief and somewhat surprising conclusion. Each chapter is organized around a trope that employs the image of adolescents to illustrate representations of a certain fantasy, such as "promise," "threat," or "nightmare." Respectively, Chapter 1 considers the persistent motif of the Soviet teenage female martyr (22), Chapter 2 explores adolescence as a site of transformation [End Page 161] and monstrosity, Chapter 3 "interrogate[s] the nexus of adolescence, violence, fantasy, and heroism" (23), while Chapter 4 aims to question "the stability of age categories" (108) and illustrate the "dynamics of progression and regression, of the blurring of boundaries between adult and adolescent" (110).

In her attempt to untangle the Soviet rudiments in Russian society and its treatment of youth, the author sets out to "elucidate the particular chronotope, the conjunction of time and space" (24). She attests to what she refers to as, borrowing from another author, "'the troubling coexistence of the old and the new' in a rapidly evolving society" (3). What I found troubling in this juxtaposition of Soviet versus post-Soviet is the failure to recognize not only the hybridity of the very nature of culture (Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2007) but also of what Madina Tlostanova poignantly conceptualizes as "the imperial-colonial chronotope," an ontology grounded in the coexistence of conflicting spacetimes ("The Imperial-Colonial Chronotope," Cultural Studies 21 [2007]: 406–27). The imperial-colonial chronotope, unrecognized by Kaminer, elucidates not only the "in-between-ness" and nonlinearity of its fabric, but also attests to the dynamism of its power relations, where the marginalized remain in competition, essential to the colonial space of the Russian empire as conceptualized by Tlostanova (408). In the case of Haunted Dreams, the marginalized actors are the youth, who are presented with the task of carving out a place of desired authenticity inside a clichéd reality that had already been labeled by the prefix of "post," implying the implicit authority of the past.

The omnipresent generational conflict that underlines the fantasies collected in the book is completely unacknowledged. It is alluded to once, through the words of one of the directors whose cinematic production is being analyzed. Specifically, the nature of the relations depicted in the TV series School is described as the "loss of intergenerational dialogue" (105). The complexity of intergenerational power dynamics depicted in the fantasies illustrated is never unpacked. Instead, it is interpreted as a call "to fortify the boundaries between adolescent and adult" (113), while depictions of adolescent struggle for self-determination are reduced to the pangs of identity crisis (105). Another missed opportunity is the phenomenon of human/nonhuman relation employed in representations of destructive youth that are briefly called to the front in Chapter 2 but never explored.

Methodologically, the book is guilty of confusing representations of adolescence with its actual experience without problematizing the relationality of experience and its representation. For example, in Chapter 3, the book goes from textual analysis largely inspired by Julia Kristeva to enlisting Vygotsky to diagnose a socio-psychological condition of actual Russian adolescents, whose [End Page 162] material lives are not discussed in the book. The reader is provided with no information about the state of public education, for example, to foreground the fantasies generated by a TV series set in a public-school setting (Chapter 4). Nor are there any attempts to show the reader what the backdrop of this "chronotope" might look like in terms of social conditions that invite the adolescent violence described.

Although novel in its attention to the Russian context, the book is engrossed by generalization and suffers from some neglectful citation. To list a few examples, in discussing the conflict between "being" and "becoming" (11), the book draws on a single reference, a theoretical work that comes from the study of twentieth-century poetry (Stephen Burt, The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence, 2012) and not on any of the myriad works of critical scholarship produced by scholars in childhood and youth studies in the past thirty years, of which the work of Emma Uprichard ("Children as 'Being and Becomings': Children, Childhood and Temporality," Children and Society 22 [2008]: 303–13) would be one relevant example. Though relevant, the claim that "Western cultures and societies have attributed a teleological component to adolescence, one that elides the present in favor of the future" (11) appears to be largely based on Nancy Lesko's Act Your Age!: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence (2012). The "contemporary Russian advice" on the meaning of romantic love is another grandiose claim based on a single source—The Big Encyclopedia for Supergirls (98). Here the author says "this and other, similar works" without providing any additional reference. Additionally, Lauren Berlant, the prolific late author of Cruel Optimism (2011), is repeatedly referred to by a wrong name, Laura, both in the text and bibliography. [End Page 163]