CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Rehnfeldt, Olle |
|---|---|
| Title | War Crime And Author Punishment: How The Invasion Of Ukraine Affected U.S. Readership Of Russian Literary Classics |
| Summary | This thesis investigates how international conflict affects the consumption of canonical cultural goods, focusing on whether Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 led to changes in U.S. readership of classical Russian literature. By analysing sales data from Amazon.com and user-generated reviews on Goodreads for six major Russian literary works, the study employs a multi-method causal inference approach including Event Time Design (ETD), Welch’s t-tests, Synthetic Control Methods (SCM), and Interrupted Time Series (ITS) regressions to test the impact of the invasion. A corpus of French classics serves as the control group for constructing counterfactual sales trajectories via SCM. The findings reveal no clear or uniform pattern of negative consumption. While War and Peace shows a consistent decline in both sales and average ratings, Crime and Punishment and The Idiot present mixed results—registering increased sales but slightly declining review scores. Other works remain largely unaffected. These outcomes could suggest that while some sensitivity to geopolitical events may exist, entrenched consumer preferences and the perceived quality of canonical literature largely shield these works from broader cultural backlash. This study contributes to the literature by expanding the methodological toolbox for studying cultural consumption under international conflict and by testing theoretical claims about negative effect resilience and path dependence in the domain of highbrow literature. It illustrates that classical works may exhibit substantial stability against external shocks, even when originating from politically stigmatised nations. |
| Supervisor | Murugesan, Anand |
| Department | Undergraduate Studies BA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/rehnfeldt_olle.pdf |
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