Jeff Berner (ed.): Astronauts of Inner-Space: An International Collection of Avant-Garde Activity (1966)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, avant-garde, computing, concrete poetry, image, language, literature, media, poetry, situationists, technology, text, theatre
17 Manifestoes, Articles, Letters, 28 Poems & 1 Filmscript.
With manifestoes by Raoul Hausmann, John Arden, Jorgen Nash, Decio Pignatari, Maurice Girodias, Bruno Munari, Allen Ginsberg, Franz Mon, Marshall McLuhan, Max Bense, Diter Rot, Otto Piene, W. S. Burroughs, Dom Sylvester Houedard, Konrad Bayer, Margaret Masterman, R. Watts
Publisher Stolen Paper Review Editions, San Francisco, and The Times Publishing Co, London, 1966
66 pages
scanned by Lori Emerson
Walter Benjamin: Moscow Diary (1980–) [EN, ES]
Filed under book | Tags: · 1920s, art, avant-garde, literature, moscow, revolution, russia, soviet union, theatre
The life of the German-Jewish literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is a veritable allegory of the life of letters in the twentieth century. Benjamin’s intellectual odyssey culminated in his death by suicide on the Franco-Spanish border, pursued by the Nazis, but long before he had traveled to the Soviet Union. His stunning account of that journey is unique among Benjamin’s writings for the frank, merciless way he struggles with his motives and conscience.
Perhaps the primary reason for his trip was his affection for Asja Lacis, a Latvian Bolshevik whom he had first met in Capri in 1924 and who would remain an important intellectual and erotic influence on him throughout the twenties and thirties. Asja Lacis resided in Moscow, eking out a living as a journalist, and Benjamin’s diary is, on one level, the account of his masochistic love affair with this elusive–and rather unsympathetic–object of desire. On another level, it is the story of a failed romance with the Russian Revolution; for Benjamin had journeyed to Russia not only to inform himself firsthand about Soviet society, but also to arrive at an eventual decision about joining the Communist Party. Benjamin’s diary paints the dilemma of a writer seduced by the promises of the Revolution yet unwilling to blinker himself to its human and institutional failings.
Moscow Diary is more than a record of ideological ambivalence; its literary value is considerable. Benjamin is one of the great twentieth-century physiognomists of the city, and his portrait of hibernal Moscow stands beside his brilliant evocations of Berlin, Naples, Marseilles, and Paris. Students of this particularly interesting period will find Benjamin’s eyewitness account of Moscow extraordinarily illuminating.
First published as Moskauer Tagebuch, Suhrkamp, 1980
English edition
Preface by Gershom Scholem
Translated by Richard Sieburth
Edited by and Afterword by Gary Smith
Published in October journal 35, Winter 1985, MIT Press
ISBN 0262751852
151 pages
Moscow Diary (English, 1985, no OCR; updated on 2012-7-18)
Moscow Diary (English, 1985, OCR; missing Preface and Afterword; updated on 2012-7-18)
Diario de Moscú (Spanish, trans. Marisa Delgado, 1990, added on 2014-3-10)
Halina Stephan: “Lef” and the Left Front of the Arts (1981)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1920s, art, avant-garde, constructivism, factography, futurism, left, literature, poetry, productivism, revolution, russia, soviet union
“This study analyzes the artistic theory and practice of the Left Front of the Arts (Levyi front iskusstv – Lef) with a special focus on the journal Lef (1923-1925). Two themes are central to this account: the organizational activities of the Lef group directed toward making Futurism a formative force within the Soviet culture and the artistic proposals published in Lef that had the same goal.”
Publisher Otto Sagner, Munich, 1981
Slavistische Beiträge series, 142
ISBN 3876901863, 9783876901862
242 pages
Review: Jullan Graffy (Slavonic and East European Review 1983).
PDF (8 MB, updated on 2012-7-18)
PDF (6 MB, added on 2020-11-25)
JPGs (added on 2015-8-10)