Russian Through Art

Russian Through Art: For Intermediate to Advanced Students develops all four language skills while enhancing students’ cultural knowledge through exposure to Russian visual arts. Each of the six thematically organised chapters is accompanied by online resources, available at https://ccle.ucla.edu/course/view/russnart. These supporting materials include online lectures, readings, audio and video clips and assignments of varying levels of difficulty, starting with description and narration tasks and progressing to discussion and debate. Each chapter contains a number of task-based and project-based assignments. The book and website’s modular design make it easy to adapt this comprehensive resource to different course needs and different levels. By the end of the course students will have broadened their active vocabulary, enhanced their grammatical skills while familiarising themselves with Russian art in its various representations and periods.

Russian Through Art: For Intermediate to Advanced Students develops all four language skills while enhancing students' cultural knowledge through exposure to Russian visual arts. Each of the six thematically organised chapters is accompanied by online resources, available at https://ccle.ucla.edu/course/view/russnart. These supporting materials include online lectures, readings, audio and video clips and assignments of varying levels of difficulty, starting with description and narration tasks and progressing to discussion and debate. Each chapter contains a number of task-based and project-based assignments. The book and website's modular design make it easy to adapt this comprehensive resource to different course needs and different levels. By the end of the course students will have broadened their active vocabulary, enhanced their grammatical skills while familiarising themselves with Russian art in its various representations and periods.

The artists’ books made in Russia between 1910 and 1915 are like no others. Unique in their fusion of the verbal, visual, and sonic, these books are meant to be read, looked at, and listened to. Painters and poets—including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky— collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed books, for which they invented a new language called zaum (a neologism meaning “beyond the mind”), which was distinctive in its emphasis on “sound as such” and its rejection of definite logical meaning. At the heart of this volume are close analyses of two of the most significant and experimental futurist books: Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) and Vzorval’ (Explodity). In addition, Nancy Perloff examines the profound differences between the Russian avant-garde and Western art movements, including futurism, and she uncovers a wide-ranging legacy in the midcentury global movement of sound and concrete poetry (the Brazilian Noigandres group, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Henri Chopin), contemporary Western conceptual art, and the artist’s book. Sound recordings of zaum poems featured in the book are available at www.getty.edu.

A major resource, collecting essays, articles, manifestos, and works of art by Russian artists and critics in the early twentieth century, available again at the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution

There is surprisingly little, and certainly nothing comprehensive, written about the contemporary Russian scene now. What appear in the West are mostly reports about so-called 'dissidents', not about what is happening in this vast culture, taken as a whole. Too often, these reports seem to be primarily inspired by a desire to demonstrate Western cultural and political superiority. The aim of Russian Art in the New Millennium is not to support any one cause, but to look at the situation as it now exists objectively and to give as wide and truthful a view as possible. Russian art during the period under review - the last two decades - has been evolving rapidly and in many directions. Hence there are sections on digital art, landscape paintings, graffiti, religious art and others. Furthermore, in addition to the continuing influence of the traditional centres for art - Moscow and St Petersburg - a number of provincial Russian cities have developed distinctive art worlds of their own. Russian Art in the New Millennium attempts to discover this terra incognita and to encompass this extremely various, but also intensely national art scene in Russia in one volume.

There is surprisingly little, and certainly nothing comprehensive, written about the contemporary Russian scene now. What appear in the West are mostly reports about so-called 'dissidents', not about what is happening in this vast culture, taken as a whole. Too often, these reports seem to be primarily inspired by a desire to demonstrate Western cultural and political superiority. The aim of Russian Art in the New Millennium is not to support any one cause, but to look at the situation as it now exists objectively and to give as wide and truthful a view as possible. Russian art during the period under review - the last two decades - has been evolving rapidly and in many directions. Hence there are sections on digital art, landscape paintings, graffiti, religious art and others. Furthermore, in addition to the continuing influence of the traditional centres for art - Moscow and St Petersburg - a number of provincial Russian cities have developed distinctive art worlds of their own. Russian Art in the New Millennium attempts to discover this terra incognita and to encompass this extremely various, but also intensely national art scene in Russia in one volume.