ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three Russian cultural projects which lack clear cultural diplomacy functions, engaging instead with the idea of global modernity in its mediatized form: a controversial film made by globe-trotting auteurist director, Andrei Konchalovsky, a television series set in London and scripted by a New York-based Russian émigré, and the upmarket Russophone magazine, Snob. Different in sensibility, they share two things: (a) they each feature cosmopolitan figures who operate within both Russian and Western cultural contexts; and (b) in their responses to Russia’s place within global modernity they all establish implicit links between mediatization and the commodification of nationhood. Because notions of projecting Russia onto the ‘global stage’ in this context become highly problematic, each example features intercultural mediators, or ‘double agents’, who translate the language of globalism into that of Russian distinctiveness and back. The three projects are unified by their awareness of the fact that efforts to re-articulate Russia’s relationship with worldliness are contaminated by that relationship’s deep immersion in its own globally mediated forms. They also share a recognition that the principles they adopt in those efforts are therefore condemned to be re-enacted repeatedly, without resolution, from which process, however, they paradoxically gain new impulse.
