Lexington Books
Pages: 246
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9
978-1-7936-1574-9 • Hardback • October 2020 • $123.00 • (£95.00)
978-1-7936-1575-6 • eBook • October 2020 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
Slav N. Gratchev is associate professor of Spanish at Marshall University.
Chapter 1: Abstraction and Estrangement across the Arts in the Russian Avant-garde
Norbert Francis
Chapter 2: L. P. Yakubinsky and M. M. Bakhtin: A Brief History of a ‘Dialogue’ that Never Really Was
Chapter 3: “Strong, Manly and Bold”: The Russian Avant-Garde and its Masculine Mantra
Tim Harte
Chapter 4: Flying Too Close to the Sun: Impersonations of Duncan in Russia
Mark Konecny
Chapter 5: Role of the Newspaper Art of the Commune in the Establishment of Proletarian Art
Natalia Murray
Chapter 6: Malevich’s “Ule Elye Lel”: A Suprematist’s Avant-garde Poetic Experimentations
Margarita Marinova
Chapter 7: The Ecological Avant-garde: Arkady Fiedler’s The River of Singing Fish
Ida Day
Chapter 8: Science Fiction in the Russian Avant-garde Cinema of the 1920s and Anarchism
Olga Burenina-Petrova
Chapter 9: Moscow Conceptualism, Post-Suprematism, and Beyond: Reimagining the Russian Avant-garde
Mary A. Nicholas
Chapter 10: The Bauhaus and the Children: An Almost Forgotten History of Avant-garde Children’s Literature
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
Chapter 11: The Problems of Translation and Popularization of Russian Avant-garde Texts in the West
Irina Evdokimova
Chapter 12: A Radical Emigré: Naum Gabo and the Legacy of the October Revolution
Christina Lodder
With a brief nod to the broadly international and interdisciplinary nature of the avant-garde as a unifying factor, the editor Slav N. Gratchev devotes the volume’s introduction to a summary of the individual chapters without proposing an overarching structure to pull them together. This serves to emphasize the diffuse nature of the avant-garde as a tenuous assemblage of topics with the editor as more bricoleur than conductor. The twelve essays in the volume thus work as individual case histories with a tendency to examine somewhat narrow swaths of the literary, cultural, and philosophical landscape that comprised the Russian and East-European avant-garde. This degree of focus frequently makes this book a valuable guide to specific corners and niches of the avant-garde that contribute to the movement’s distinctiveness. The insights offered by a more microscopic approach to the avant-garde are evident in a number of the volume’s chapters.
— The Russian Review
This wide-ranging collection cuts across disciplinary boundaries, enriching and refining our understanding of the Russian avant-garde; there is so much that is new here and so much that readers with interest in art history, film, literature, architecture, and dance are bound to enjoy.— Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London