Julia Vaingurt: Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s (2013)

“In postrevolutionary Russia, as the Soviet government was initiating a program of rapid industrialization, avant-garde artists declared their intent to serve the nascent state and to transform life in accordance with their aesthetic designs. In spite of their professed utilitarianism, however, most avant-gardists created works that can hardly be regarded as practical instruments of societal transformation. Exploring this paradox, Vaingurt claims that the artists’ investment of technology with aesthetics prevented their creations from being fully conscripted into the arsenal of political hegemony. The purposes of avant-garde technologies, she contends, are contemplative rather than constructive. Looking at Meyerhold’s theater, Tatlin’s and Khlebnikov’s architectural designs, Mayakovsky’s writings, and other works from the period, Vaingurt offers an innovative reading of an exceptionally complex moment in the formation of Soviet culture.”

Publisher Northwestern University Press, 2013
SRLT series
ISBN 0810128942, 9780810128941
322 pages
via Sorin

Review: Boris Dralyuk (NEP, 2013), Tim Harte (Slavic Review, 2014).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2022-11-12)

See also the science-fiction film Aelita, Queen of Mars, dir. Yakov Protazanov, 1924, 111 min, based on Tolstoy’s novel.

Martin Puchner: Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (2005)

“Poetry of the Revolution tells the story of political and artistic upheavals through the manifestos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ranging from the Communist Manifesto to the manifestos of the 1960s and beyond, it highlights the varied alliances and rivalries between socialism and repeated waves of avant-garde art. Martin Puchner argues that the manifesto–what Marx called the ‘poetry’ of the revolution–was the genre through which modern culture articulated its revolutionary ambitions and desires. When it intruded into the sphere of art, the manifesto created an art in its own image: shrill and aggressive, political and polemical. The result was “manifesto art”–combinations of manifesto and art that fundamentally transformed the artistic landscape of the twentieth century.

Central to modern politics and art, the manifesto also measures the geography of modernity. The translations, editions, and adaptations of such texts as the Communist Manifesto and the Futurist Manifesto registered and advanced the spread of revolutionary modernity and of avant-garde movements across Europe and to the Americas. The rapid diffusion of these manifestos was made “possible by networks–such as the successive socialist internationals and international avant-garde movements–that connected Santiago and Zurich, Moscow and New York, London and Mexico City. Poetry of the Revolution thus provides the point of departure for a truly global analysis of modernism and modernity.”

Publisher Princeton University Press, 2005
Translation/Transnation series
ISBN 1400844126, 9781400844128
336 pages
via delery

Reviews: Gregory Byala (Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature), Randy Martin (The Drama Review), Matthew Rebhorn (Modern Drama), Laura A. Winkiel (Modernism/Modernity), Gavin Grindon (Papers of Surrealism).

Publisher

PDF (16 MB, updated on 2017-6-18)

See also the entry on Marxist aesthetics on Monoskop wiki.

Hélène Cixous: Manna: For the Mandelstams for the Mandelas (1988/1994)

“They didn’t know each other, but they knew the same suffering.

A Russian Jewish poet who died in exile in Siberia; a South African political leader who survived his banishment to prison: The two men, Osip Mandelstam and Nelson Mandela, so far apart in time and space, are brought together in this story, their shared destinies unraveled in light of the Jewish and African diasporas.

In Manna, Hélène Cixous, a writer associated with the notion of écriture féminine and a major figure in Continental feminist practice during the 1970s and early 1980s, continues her disruption of the orthodoxies of politics and social order through the liberating use of poetic language. In this act of willful writing, by turns lyrical and intense, she links her two distant subjects through the common first syllables of their names, the dates of their respective exiles, and the women, Nadezhda Mandelstam and Winnie-Zami Mandela, who disclose and restore their partners’ lives through language.

For Cixous, politics is approached most openly and freely through poetry; no social change occurs without linguistic change. In Manna her poetic language mediates the historical, political, and personal narratives of Mandelstam and Mandela (two cores lodged in the heart of the world) to produce a new sense of individual tragedy and cultural possibility. An act of emancipation, exhilarating in the way it subverts the master texts of social and political power, this strange and beautiful book releases its subjects-and its readers-from the limited language of constraint and exile.”

First published as Manne aux Mandelstams aux Mandelas, Les Editions des Femmes. Paris, 1988.

Translated and with an Introduction by Catherine A. F. MacGillivray
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1994
ISBN 0816621144, 9780816621149
294 pages
via leninbert

Review: Clare Cavanagh (Slavic Review, 1997).

Publisher

PDF