Konstantin Akinsha: The Second Life of Soviet Photomontage, 1935-1980s (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, art history, avant-garde, cinema, constructivism, film, ideology, montage, photography, photomontage, politics, propaganda, russia, socialist realism, soviet union
“This dissertation explores the development of Soviet photomontage from the second half of the 1930s to the end of the 1970s. Until now, the transformation of the modernist medium and its incorporation into the everyday practice of Soviet visual propaganda during and after the Second World War has not attracted much scholarly attention. The firm association of photomontage with the Russian avant-garde in general, and with Constructivism in particular, has led art historians to disregard the fact that the medium was practised in the USSR until the final days of the Soviet system. The conservative government organisations in control of propaganda preserved satirical photomontage in its post-Dadaist phase and Heartfield-like form, finding it useful in the production of negative propaganda.”
Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation
University of Edinburgh, 2012
328 pages + 368 pages of illustrations
PDF (29 MB)
Comment (0)Julia Vaingurt: Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1920s, aesthetics, architecture, art, art history, avant-garde, biomechanics, body, cinema, communism, constructivism, design, literature, machine, politics, russia, science fiction, sexuality, socialism, soviet union, technē, technology, theatre
“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).
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.
Comments (2)Hans Günther, Sabine Hänsgen (eds.): Soviet Power and the Media (2006) [Russian]
Filed under book | Tags: · 1920s, 1930s, cinema, communism, film, media, media theory, photography, politics, print, radio, socialist realism, sound, soviet union, technology, theatre
Proceedings from the conference “The Political as Communicative Space in History” (Bielefeld, October 2003) devoted to the comparative analysis of the media in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s provide a pioneering media-theoretical exploration of the role of radio, film, photography and print in the engineering of the communist Soviet power.
Sovetskaya vlast’ i media [Советская власть и медиа]
Publisher Akademicheskiy proekt, St. Petersburg, 2006
Open Access
ISBN 5733103353, 9785733103358
621 pages
Reviews: Wolfgang Schlott (Die Welt der Slaven, 2007, DE, PDF), Alexander Prokhorov (Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 2007), Alexander Ulanov (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007, RU), Jana Klenhova (ArtMargins, 2008), Yuliya Liderman (Usloviya teatra, RU, 2010).
PDF (broken link fixed on 2014-1-28)
PDFs