Provost Tim Harte's Book Makes WSJ List of Best Books on Soviet Era Sports
Faster, Higher, Stronger, Comrades!: Sports, Art, and Ideology in Late Russian and Early Soviet Culture by Provost and Professor of Russian Tim Harte made a Wall Street Journal list of "The Five Best Books on the Soviet Era in Sports." The books were selected by Rae Meadows, author of the novel Winterland.
From the article:
"Although the revolution wiped out much of Imperial Russia’s culture, modern sports provided an important bridge for both art and life. 'Russia and early Soviet art fused modern sports with innovation, revolution, and the widespread belief that such creativity could help bring about not only a better human physique, but also a better society,' Mr. Harte writes. But with Stalin, sports became a vehicle to advance the regime’s heroic ethos and ideology, a change that would endure."
Harte is also the author of Fast Forward: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910-1930, published in 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press. His research interests center on 20th-century Russian literature, film, and culture. His teaching interests include courses on 20th-century Russian literature (Nabokov, Chekhov), avant-garde culture, contemporary Russian culture, silent cinema, Soviet and Eastern European cinema of the 1960s, and, last but not least, the Russian language.