The Unsung Hero Of The Russian Avant Garde

The first biography of Nikolay Punin, this book offers a comprehensive analysis of his life in the context of Russian political, social and cultural history in the first half of the 20th century.

The first biography of Nikolay Punin, this book offers a comprehensive analisys of his life in the context of Russian political, social and cultural history in the first half of the XX century.

Hailed as a brilliant theoretician, Voldemārs Matvejs (best known by his pen name Vladimir Markov) was a Latvian artist who spearheaded the Union of Youth, a dynamic group championing artistic change in Russia, 1910-14. His work had a formative impact on Malevich, Tatlin, and the Constructivists before it was censored during the era of Soviet realism. This volume introduces Markov as an innovative and pioneering art photographer and assembles, for the first time, five of his most important essays. The translations of these hard-to-find texts are fresh, unabridged, and authentically poetic. Critical essays by Jeremy Howard and Irena Buzinska situate his work in the larger phenomenon of Russian ’primitivism’, i.e. the search for the primal. This book challenges hardening narratives of primitivism by reexamining the enthusiasm for world art in the early modern period from the perspective of Russia rather than Western Europe. Markov composed what may be the first book on African art and Z.S. Strother analyzes both the text and its photographs for their unique interpretation of West African sculpture as a Kantian ’play of masses and weights’. The book will appeal to students of modernism, orientalism, ’primitivism’, historiography, African art, and the history of the photography of sculpture.

In 1911 Vasily Kandinsky published the first edition of ‘On the Spiritual in Art’, a landmark modernist treatise in which he sought to reframe the meaning of art and the true role of the artist. For many artists of late Imperial Russia – a culture deeply influenced by the regime’s adoption of Byzantine Orthodoxy centuries before – questions of religion and spirituality were of paramount importance. As artists and the wider art community experimented with new ideas and interpretations at the dawn of the twentieth century, their relationship with ‘the spiritual’ – broadly defined – was inextricably linked to their roles as pioneers of modernism. This diverse collection of essays introduces new and stimulating approaches to the ongoing debate as to how Russian artistic modernism engaged with questions of spirituality in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Ten chapters from emerging and established voices offer new perspectives on Kandinsky and other familiar names, such as Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Larionov, and Natalia Goncharova, and introduce less well-known figures, such as the Georgian artists Ucha Japaridze and Lado Gudiashvili, and the craftswoman and art promoter Aleksandra Pogosskaia. Prefaced by a lively and informative introduction by Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow that sets these perspectives in their historical and critical context, Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives enriches our understanding of the modernist period and breaks new ground in its re-examination of the role of religion and spirituality in the visual arts in late Imperial Russia. Of interest to historians and enthusiasts of Russian art, culture, and religion, and those of international modernism and the avant-garde, it offers innovative readings of a history only partially explored, revealing uncharted corners and challenging long-held assumptions.

The International Yearbook of Futurism Studies was founded in 2009, the centenary year of Italian Futurism, in order to foster intellectual cooperation between Futurism scholars across countries and academic disciplines. The Yearbook does not focus exclusively on Italian Futurism, but on the relations between Italian Futurism and other Futurisms worldwide, on artistic movements inspired by Futurism, and on artists operating in the international sphere with close contacts to Italian or Russian Futurism. Volume 4 (2014) is an open issue that addresses reactions to Italian Futurism in 16 countries (Argentina, Armenia, Brazil, Egypt, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Holland, Hungary, Japan, Portugal, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, USA), and in the artistic media of photography, theatre and visual poetry.

Dmitry Likhachev (1906-1999) was one of the most prominent Russian intellectuals of the twentieth century. His life spanned virtually the entire century - a tumultuous period which saw Russia move from Tsarist rule under Nicholas II via the Russian Revolution and Civil War into seven decades of communism followed by Gorbachev's Perestroika and the rise of Putin. In 1928, shortly after completing his university education, Likhachev was arrested, charged with counter-revolutionary ideas and imprisoned in the Gulag, where he spent the next five years. Returning to a career in academia, specialising in Old Russian literature, Likhachev played a crucial role in the cultural life of twentieth-century Russia, campaigning for the protection of important cultural sites and historic monuments. He also founded museums dedicated to great Russian writers including Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Pasternak. In this, the first biography of Likhachev to appear in English, Vladislav Zubok provides a thoroughly-researched account of one of Russia's most extraordinary and influential public figures.

Through 30 interpretative essays, The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Russian Revolution sees an international team of leading scholars comprehensively examine Russia's revolutionary years. In the wake of the 2017 centenary, this handbook is the first reference point for anyone wishing to learn more about the changes which took place in Russia between 1917 and 1921 and subsequently the 20th century. Split into six sections covering political crises, politicians and parties, social groups, identities, regions and peoples, and civil war, the volume covers the collapse of Tsarism and the February Revolution, the emergence of the Provisional Government, and major historical figures such as Lenin, Kerensky and the Socialist Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov. It also explores the events surrounding the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, the first year of Soviet Government until the Bolshevik dictatorship was established, and the impact on Russia of the subsequent civil war. The focus is broader than these issues of high politics, however, since this handbook also considers events in the provinces as well as revolutionary Petrograd, and examines the social impact of the revolution in terms of class, gender, age and culture.

This book is a comprehensive introduction to the relationship between communism (understood as an ideological, political, and social project) and culture, broadly defined as the field of aesthetic production. Communism was a global phenomenon, and the global civil war of the 20th century was, in more than one respect, a cultural war, which involved some of the most influential figures of the last century. The book highlights and explains the impact of political mythologies in the effiorts to transcend the “bourgeois” legacies and engage in a social, cultural, and anthropological revolution. The authors examine the interplay between utopian goals and cultural practices in fields such as literature, visual arts, film, and humanities in general.