Graham Roberts: The Last Soviet Avant-Garde: OBERIU – Fact, Fiction, Metafiction (1997)

“This is the first comprehensive study of the group of avant-garde Soviet writers who styled themselves OBERIU, “The Association for Real Art”. Graham Roberts reexamines commonly-held assumptions about OBERIU, its identity as a group, its aesthetics, its relationship to the formalists and the Bakhtin circle, and its place within Russian and European literary traditions. Roberts concludes by showing how the self-conscious literature of OBERIU–its metafiction–occupies an important transitional space between modernism and postmodernism.

– A comprehensive study of important Soviet avant-garde group
– Sets the work of OBERIU in aesthetic and theoretical context of formalism and the Bakhtin circle
– Provides insights into the relationship between modernism and postmodernism”

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1997
Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature
ISBN 0521482836, 9780521482837
274 pages

Oberiu on Wikipedia
Publisher

PDF (6 MB, updated on 2016-12-23)

George M. Young: The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (2012)

“The nineteenth and early twentieth century saw the emergence of a controversial school of Russian thinkers, led by the philosopher Nikolai Fedorov and united in the conviction that humanity was entering a new stage of evolution in which it must assume a new, active, managerial role in the cosmos. In the first account in English of this fascinating tradition, George M. Young offers a dynamic and wide-ranging examination of the lives and ideas of the Russian Cosmists.

Suppressed during the Soviet period and little noticed in the West, the ideas of the Cosmists have in recent decades been rediscovered and embraced by many Russian intellectuals and are now recognized as essential to a native Russian cultural and intellectual tradition. Although they were scientists, theologians, and philosophers, the Cosmists addressed topics traditionally confined to occult and esoteric literature. Major themes include the indefinite extension of the human life span to establish universal immortality; the restoration of life to the dead; the reconstitution of the human organism to enable future generations to live beyond earth; the regulation of nature to bring all manifestations of blind natural force under rational human control; the transition of our biosphere into a “noosphere,” with a sheath of mental activity surrounding the planet; the effect of cosmic rays and currently unrecognized particles of energy on human history; practical steps toward the reversal and eventual human control over the flow of time; and the virtues of human androgyny, autotrophy, and invisibility.

The Russian Cosmists is a crucial contribution to scholarship concerning Russian intellectual history, the future of technology, and the history of western esotericism.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2012
ISBN 0199892946, 9780199892945
280 pages
via falsedeity

Reviews: Stephen Roulac (Russian Journal of Books, n.d.)
Julia Mannherz (Slavic Review, 2013).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-10-1)

From VKhUTEMAS to MARKhI, 1920-36 (2005) [English/Russian]

This album contains exercises, diploma works and projects of graduates and professors of the Moscow schools that graduated architects in the 1920s and 1930s: VKhUTEMAS-VKhUTEIN, MPI-MIGI, MVTU, and ASI-MAI. The book includes both original works and photos of projects and models gathered by the MARKhI Museum in 1989-2004. Most materials are published for the first time.

From VKhUTEMAS to MARKhI, 1920-1936: Architectural projects from the collection of the MARKhI Museum
Editors A.P. Kudryavtsev, N.O. Dushkina
Authors L.I.Ivanova-Veen, E.B. Ovsiannikova
Publisher A-Fond Publishers, Moscow, 2005
ISBN 9077344098, 9789077344095
231 pages

PDF, PDF (92 MB, updated on 2019-4-2)