Ries, Nancy

Ries, Nancy. 1997. Russian Talk Culture and Conversation during Perestroika. Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press. 

By conveying qualities of relatedness, cultivation, and generation, these terms evoke processes of reproduction that are simultaneously social and biological. These qualities are captured beautifully in the comments of one of Nancy Ries s Russian interlocutors Rodina is habitat, nature, soil— but it s a very fermenting thing. Upon or within it history takes place ... 

This visceral soulfulness derives from a particularly Russian conception of geographic nationalism, a connection made explicit by one of Nancy Ries s Muscovite informants in this statement about dusha (soul) Dusha is the ability to feel very deeply. So you feel deeply, first of all nature, the beauty of nature, the oneness, your own oneness with nature, and this whole feeling of being at one with the landscape means that you are part of the landscape, and that the landscape expresses the same kinds of feelings that you experience yourself (quoted in Ries 1997 30). 

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