Marci Shore: Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968 (2006)

“‘In the elegant capital city of Warsaw, the editor Mieczyslaw Grydzewski would come with his two dachshunds to a café called Ziemianska.’ Thus begins the history of a generation of Polish literati born at the fin de siècle. They sat in Café Ziemianska and believed that the world moved on what they said there. Caviar and Ashes tells the story of the young avant-gardists of the early 1920s who became the radical Marxists of the late 1920s. They made the choice for Marxism before Stalinism, before socialist realism, before Marxism meant the imposition of Soviet communism in Poland. It ended tragically.

Marci Shore begins with this generation’s coming of age after the First World War and narrates a half-century-long journey through futurist manifestos and proletarian poetry, Stalinist terror and Nazi genocide, a journey from the literary cafés to the cells of prisons and the corridors of power. Using newly available archival materials from Poland and Russia, as well as from Ukraine and Israel, Shore explores what it meant to live Marxism as a European, an East European, and a Jewish intellectual in the twentieth century.”

Publisher Yale University Press, 2006
ISBN 0300110928, 9780300110920
457 pages

Reviews: Irena Grudzińska-Gross (The Polish Review), Robert Blobaum (The American Historical Journal), Matthew Kaminski (The Wall Street Journal).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-12-2)

Jeff Nuttall: Bomb Culture (1968/1970)

“Jeff Nuttall’s book, Bomb Culture, an idiosyncratic and semi-auto-biographical account of the build-up to 1968, was written in 1967 and first published just before May 1968. It remains a key primary source for the emergence of international counter-culture in the 1960s. Nuttall played a key role in the London underground scene and coordinated a network of connections with European and American avant-gardes through correspondence and the instigation of a number of small journals and pamphlets, publishing William Burroughs, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Carl Weissner and Michael McLure in his My Own Mag between 1964-67. Through a diverse body of practices, Nuttall – a performance artist and poet – advocated the insurrectionary power of spontaneity and persistently articulated a connection between the power of the imagination and collective revolutionary political consciousness.” (Gillian Whiteley, 2008)

First published by MacGibbon & Kee, 1968
Publisher Paladin, London, 1970; 1972 reprint
252 pages
via filboid

Interview with the author (John May, 1984)
Wikipedia

PDF (no OCR)

Stewart Home: The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War (1988–) [EN, IT, ES]

In The Assault on Culture, Stewart Home outlines the subterranean history of mid-to-late 20th century avant-gardes in which artistic and political vanguardism emerge as indissociable. In a comprehensive overview of relatively marginal movements—such as lettrism, situationism, and punk—Home analyzes these radical practices and experiences, which, due to their involvement in alternative forms of sociability as well as their relational, process-oriented, and political character, have remained at the margins of dominant art historiography. Home thereby establishes a critical rewriting of the neo avant-garde from a perspective that shares little with the paradigm of modernist formalism. (from MACBA)

First published by Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988
Second UK edition, by AK Press, 1991

Review: Libero Andreotti (J Architectural Education, 1996).
Commentary: Not Bored! (1996, Home’s response)

The Assault on Culture (PDF), EPUB, HTML (from the author)
Assalto alla cultura (Italian, trans. Luther Blissett, 1996, unpaginated)
El asalto a la cultura (Spanish, trans. Jesus Carrillo and Jordi Claramonte, 2002)

See also Home’s Neoism, Plagiarism & Praxis, 1995.