Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jacob Wamberg (eds.): Totalitarian Art and Modernity (2010)

“In spite of the steadily expanding concept of art in the Western world, art made in twentieth-century totalitarian regimes – notably Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the communist East Bloc countries – is still to a surprising degree excluded from mainstream art history and the exhibits of art museums. In contrast to earlier art made to promote princely or ecclesiastical power, this kind of visual culture seems to somehow not fulfill the category of ‘true’ art, instead being marginalised as propaganda for politically suspect regimes.

Totalitarian Art and Modernity wants to modify this displacement, comparing totalitarian art with modernist and avant-garde movements; confronting their cultural and political embeddings; and writing forth their common generalogies. Its eleven articles include topics as varied as: the concept of totalitarianism and totalitarian art, totalitarian exhibitions, monuments and architecture, forerunners of totalitarian art in romanticism and heroic realism, and diverse receptions of totalitarian art in democratic cultures.”

With contributions by Mikkel Bolt, Sandra Esslinger, Jørn Guldberg, Paul Jaskot, Jacob Wamberg, Christina Kiaer, Anders V. Munch, Kristine Nielsen, Olaf Peters, K. Andrea Rusnock, and Marla Stone.

Publisher Aarhus University Press, Århus, 2010
Acta Jutlandica series, 9
ISBN 8779345603, 9788779345607
359 pages
via Mikkel Bolt

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (10 MB)

Nadezhda Mandelstam: Hope Against Hope: A Memoir (1970) [RU, EN]

“Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir of her life with poet Osip, who was first arrested in 1934 and died in Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937-38. The book is a vital eyewitness account of Stalin’s Soviet Union and one of the greatest testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written.”

Publisher Chekhov Publishing Corp., New York, 1970
432 pages

English edition
Translated by Max Hayward
With an Introduction by Clarence Brown
Publisher Atheneum, New York, 1970
Fifth printing, 1983
ISBN 0689705301
xvi+432 pages

Reviews: George Ivask (Slavic Review, 1971), Simon Karlinsky (Slavic and East European Journal, 1971), Robert P. Hughes (Russian Review, 1971), Seamus Heaney (London Review of Books, 1981), Elaine Feinstein (The Independent, 2013).
Commentary: Judith Robey (Slavic and East European Journal, 1998).

Vospominaniya (Russian, 1970/1999, TXT; HTML)
Hope Against Hope (English, 1970/1983, PDF/42 MB; DJVU/7 MB)

Ilya Kabakov: The 1960s and 1970s: Notes on Unofficial Life in Moscow (1999) [RU, EN]

A memoir, originally written in 1982 and 1986, by the Russian conceptual artist now living in the United States. “He belongs to the generation of underground (or nonconformist) artists that emerged with the liberalization of domestic policies in the Soviet Union in the 1960s during the Krushchev “thaw”. That generation formed a subculture in resistance to the ideological settings of “official art”, of Socialist Realism, as well as to Soviet ideology and the life style of ‘homo sovieticus’. This book is a memoir of the ‘underground years’ and offers a unique insider’s perspective on artistic life during a period of ‘prohibition’ through an exploration of the tension between totalitarian politics and resistance aesthetics.” (from a review by Volha Isakava)

60-е-70-е. записки о неофициальной жизни в Москве
Publisher Gesellschaft zur Förderung Slawistischer Studien, Vienna, 1999
Wiener Slawistischer Almanach. Sonderbände, 47
Digital edition by Otto Sagner, Munich, 2012
ISBN 9783954796380
267 pages

Conversation with Ilya and Emilia Kabakov (Anton Vidokle, e-flux, 2012, EN)

Reviews: Volha Isakava (Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2005, EN), Julianne Fürst (Kritika, 2013, EN).
Commentary: Keti Chukhrov (2010, EN).

Publisher

JPGs, PDF (RU)
PDF (8 MB, RU)
Short excerpt in English translation