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.

E. P. Thompson: William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, rev. ed. (1955/1977)

This biographical study is a window into 19th-century British society and the life of William Morris—the great craftsman, architect, designer, poet, and writer—who remains an influential figure to this day. This account chronicles how his concern with artistic and human values led him to cross what he called the “river of fire” and become a committed socialist—committed not only to the theory of socialism but also to the practice of it in the day-to-day struggle of working women and men in Victorian England. While both the British Labor Movement and the Marxists have venerated Morris, this legacy of his life proves that many of his ideas did not accord with the dominant reforming tendencies, providing a unique perspective on Morris scholarship.

First published by The Merlin Press, London, 1955
Publisher Pantheon Books, New York, 1977
ISBN 0394733207
829 pages

Review (Eli Zaretsky, Studies in Romanticism, 1977)
Review (Patrick Parrinder, Science Fiction Studies, 1980)
Thompson’s lecture on Morris to the Williams Morris Society (1959)

Publisher (new edition, 2011)

PDF (109 MB, no OCR)
See also Morris’ novel News from Nowhere (1890/93) in the Internet Archive.

Roman Rosdolsky: The Making of Marx’s Capital (1968–) [IT, SR-CR, EN, ES, PT-BR]

Rosdolsky’s Making of Marx’s ‘Capital’ is a major work of interpretation and criticism, written over fifteen years by one of the foremost representatives of the European marxist tradition. Rosdolsky investigates the relationship between various versions of Capital and explains the reasons for Marx’s sucessive reworkings; he provides a textual exegesis of Marx’s Grundrisse, now widely available, and reveals its methodological riches. He presents a critique of later work in the marxist tradition on the basis of Marx’s fundamental distinction between ‘capital in general’ and ‘capital in conrete reality.’

First published in German as Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen ‘Kapital’, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Frankfut am Main, 1968

English edition
Translated by Pete Burgess
Publisher Pluto Press, London, 1977
581 pages

Review (Makoto Itoh, Science & Society, 1979)
Wikipedia (DE)

Genesi e struttura del “Capitale” di Marx (Italian, trans. Bruno Maffi, 1971, no OCR, 21 MB, via)
Prilog povijesti nastajanja Marxova “Kapitala”, sv. 1, sv. 2 (Serbo-Croatian, trans. Ivan Prpić [1] and Hotimir Burger [2], 1975)
The Making of Marx’s Capital (English, trans. Pete Burgess, 1977, 10 MB)
Génesis y estructura de El Capital de Marx (Spanish, trans. Léon Mames, 2nd ed., 1978/2004, no OCR, 11 MB)
Genese e estrutura de O capital de Karl Marx (Brazilian Portuguese, trans. César Benjamin, 2001, no OCR, 20 MB)