Vladimir Markov: Russian Futurism: A History (1968)

“Vladimir Markov’s Russian Futurism: A History is the classic in its field. Its learned account of Russian avant-garde poetics with respect to various forms and genres-poems, plays, artist’s books, manifestos-is still the first I turn to when I want to review the critical information about Futurist manifestos or Khlebnikov’s long poems and stories, or the collaborations of Goncharova and Kruchenykh.” – Marjorie Perloff

Publisher University of California Press, 1968
ISBN 9780520008113
467 pages
via greatjob

Reviews: Helen Muchnic (Russian Review, 1969), Xenia Gasiorowska (Slavic and East European Journal, 1970), Maurice Friedberg (Problems of Communism, 1970), Edward Wasiolek (Modern Philology, 1972).

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Andrei Smirnov, Liubov Pchelkina: Generation Z: Russian Pioneers of Sound Art and Musical Technology in 1910-1930 (2011) [English/Hungarian]

Variophone, theremin terpsitone, rhythmicon, emiriton, ekvodin, graphical sound – just to mention a few of the amazing innovations of the beginning of the 20th century in Soviet Russia, a country and time turbulent with revolutions, wars and totalitarian dictatorship.

While the history of Russian post-revolutionary avant-garde art and music is fairly well documented, the inventions and discoveries, names and fates of researchers of sound, creators of musical machines and noise orchestras, founders of new musical technologies have been largely forgotten except, perhaps, Leon Theremin, inventor of the first electronic musical instrument, the theremin.

This community of creators, however, was inherently incompatible with the totalitarian state. By the late 1930s it became effectively written out of histories, wiped out from text books.

Many of their ideas and inventions, considered as utopian at that time, were decades later rein¬vented abroad. We still use them today not knowing their origin.

This booklet was produced for the Budapest edition of a traveling exhibition curated by Andrei Smirnov of the Theremin Center and Liubov Pchelkina of the State Tretyakov Gallery.

Publisher OSA Archivum, Budapest, 2011
ISBN 9789638853820
20 pages

exhibition (from the curators)
exhibition (gallery website)

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Walter Benjamin: Early Writings, 1910-1917 (2011)

“Walter Benjamin became a published writer at the age of seventeen. Yet the first stirrings of this most original of critical minds—penned during the years in which he transformed himself from the comfortable son of a haute-bourgeois German Jewish family into the nomadic, uncompromising philosopher-critic we have since come to appreciate—have until now remained largely unavailable in English. Early Writings, 1910-1917 rectifies this situation, documenting the formative intellectual experiences of one of the twentieth century’s most resolutely independent thinkers.

Here we see the young Benjamin in his various roles as moralist, cultural critic, school reformer, and poet-philosopher. The diversity of interest and profundity of thought characteristic of his better-known work from the 1920s and 30s are already in evidence, as we witness the emergence of critical projects that would occupy Benjamin throughout his intellectual career: the role of the present in historical remembrance, the relationship of the intellectual to political action, the idea of truth in works of art, and the investigation of language as the veiled medium of experience.

Even at this early stage, a recognizably Benjaminian way of thinking comes into view—a daring, boundary-crossing enterprise that does away with classical antitheses in favor of the relentlessly-seeking critical consciousness that produced the groundbreaking works of his later years. With the publication of these early writings, our portrait of one of the most significant intellects of the twentieth century edges closer to completion.”

The book is a translation of selections from Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1972-1989, Suhrkamp Verlag
Translated by Howard Eiland and Others
Publisher Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge/MA and London, 2011
ISBN 0674049934, 9780674049932
303 pages

Benjamin at Monoskop wiki
publisher

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