Kelly, Catriona
Description
Russian Modernism began with the triumph of the symbolist style and survived until the Stalinist terror of the late 1930s. It was an age bristling wit
...
h visions of glorious or terrifying futures, with manifestos for new artistic movements, and with furious feuds between them. Utopias brings together Mikhail Bakhtin's celebrated analysis of "carnival culture"; reflections by painter and stage designer Leon Bakst and film director Sergei Einstein; and major texts by Isaac Babel and Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Nabokov and Boris Pasternak; as well as many works by less well-known but equally talented figures. This richly illustrated collection offers an astonishing look at one of history's most stimulating artistic eras.
"Modernism everywhere entailed a drastic, dangerous breach with the past; in Russia it gained an extra impetus from an entire society's efforts to modernize itself. Utopias tells the whole whirligig story. . . . This is the Dr. Zhivago for highbrows!" --Peter Conrad, author of Modern Times, Modern Places: How Life and Art Were Transformed in a Century of Revolution, Innovation, and Radical Change
Read more