'Petrified Utopia' redresses the lack of scholarship on the issue of the pursuit of collective happiness in Soviet culture, and presents a collection of essays that discuss different manifestations of happiness in literature and visual culture.

Part One: Utopics: A Joyful Soviet Childhood: Happiness for Little Ones; Utopian Naturalism: The Epic Poem of Kolkhoz Happiness; Luxuriating in Lack; Plentitude and Consuming in Soviet Paintings and Posters, 1920-1953; Tasty and Healthy; Soviet Happiness in One Book; Part Two: Realities; ‘It’s Grand to Be an Orphan!’ Crafting Happy Citizens in Soviet Children’s Literature of the 1920s; Sew Yourself Soviet: The Pleasures of Textile in the Machine Age; Happy Housewarming: Moving Into Kruschev-Era Apartments; ‘When We Were Happy’: Remembering Soviet Holidays; Part Three: Locations; The ‘New Moscow’ and the New ‘Happiness’: Architecture as a Nodal Point in the Stalinist System of Value; Andrei Platonov’s Happy Moscow: Tolstoi, Stalin and the Soviet Self; ‘But Where Is Your Happiness, Alevtina Ivanovna?: New Debates About Happiness in the Soviet Films of 1956; Easy on the Heart, or ‘Strength Through Joy’