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Addressing a century of change from late nineteenth-century realism to late 1970s Sots Art, this volume presents new research on how art making, criticism, and promotion responded dynamically to the fast-moving social, cultural, and political contexts of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Case studies of artists reveal how figures such as Viktor Vasnetsov and Kazimir Malevich [Kazymyr Malevych] incorporated contemporary debates into their artworks and expanded their visual expressiveness. Analyses of writings by Wassily Kandinsky and Nikolai Punin illustrate the central role played by critics, theorists, and artists' societies in catalyzing new approaches. Lastly, essays focusing on the So...
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 ess...
FAIRY TALES, FOLK TALES, FABLES, MAGICAL TALES & TRADITIONAL STORIES. In the 1880s, the artist, designer and illustrator Elena Polenova (1850-98) began illustrating fairy tales that she noted down during her travels around Russian villages. The first of these was The Tale of Masha and Vanya. The original editions of some of these illustrated fairy-tales are now kept at Polenovo, the museum-estate of the artists family, and this is the first English-language publication based upon Polenova's original hand-made drawings and typography. Sister of the landscape artist Vasily Polenov, and a leading member of the Abramtsevo circle of Russian artists, who engaged with peasant traditions and folklore towards the end of the nineteenth century, Elena Polenova is well known in Russia and abroad, but her illustrations to fairy tales have had little exposure. With a new translation by Robert Chandler, this beautifully crafted book is published to coincide with an exhibition in the UK of the artists work. Ages 9+
"The essays in this stimulating collection attest to the scope and variety of Russia's influence on British culture. They move from the early nineteenth century -- when Byron sent his hero Don Juan to meet Catherine the Great, and an English critic sought to come to terms with the challenge of Pushkin -- to a series of Russian-themed exhibitions at venues including the Crystal Palace and Earls Court. The collection looks at British encounters with Russian music, the absorption with Dostoevskii and Chekhov, and finishes by shedding light on Britain's engagement with Soviet film."--Back cover.
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Writers in Museums 1798-1898
This book outlines with theoretical and literary historical rigor a highly innovative approach to the writing of Russian literary history and to the reading of canonical Russian texts. "Anticipatory plagiarism” is a concept developed by the French Oulipo group, but it has never to my knowledge been explored with reference to Russian studies. The editors and contributors to the proposed volume – a blend of senior and beginning scholars, Russians and non-Russians – offer a set of essays on Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy which provocatively test the utility of AP as a critical tool, relating these canonical authors to more recent instances, some of them decidedly non-canonical. The senior...
In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective art...
Russomania is the first comprehensive account of the breadth and depth of the modernist fascination with Russian and early Soviet culture. It traces Russia's transformative effect on literary and intellectual life in Britain between 1881 and 1922, from the assassination of Alexander II to the formation of the Soviet Union. Studying canonical writers alongside a host of less well known authors and translators, it provides an archive-rich study of institutions, disciplines, and networks. Book jacket.
In the early twentieth century, a group of writers banded together in Moscow to create purely original modes of expression. These avant-garde artists, known as the Futurists, distinguished themselves by mastering the art of the scandal and making shocking denunciations of beloved icons. With publications such as "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste," they suggested that Aleksandr Pushkin, the founder of Russian literature, be tossed off the side of their "steamship of modernity." Through systematic and detailed readings of Futurist texts, James Rann offers the first book-length study of the tensions between the outspoken literary group and the great national poet. He observes how those in the movement engaged with and invented a new Pushkin, who by turns became a founding father to rebel against, a source of inspiration to draw from, a prophet foreseeing the future, and a monument to revive. Rann's analysis contributes to the understanding of both the Futurists and Pushkin's complex legacy. The Unlikely Futurist will appeal broadly to scholars of Slavic studies, especially those interested in literature and modernism.