Rens Bod, Jaap Maat, Thijs Weststeijn (eds.): The Making of the Humanities, Vol. 3: The Modern Humanities (2014)

“This comprehensive history of the humanities focuses on the modern period (1850-2000). The contributors, including Floris Cohen, Lorraine Daston and Ingrid Rowland, survey the rise of the humanities in interaction with the natural and social sciences, offering new perspectives on the interaction between disciplines in Europe and Asia and new insights generated by digital humanities.”

Publisher Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2014
Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 License
ISBN 9789089645166
724 pages

Conference
Publisher
OAPEN

PDF, PDF (6 MB, updated on 2022-12-20)
Volumes 1-2

Edward Braun: Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre (1979/1995)

“Legendary Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) led the revolt against naturalism and flouted Stalinist socialist realism with his avant-garde productions incorporating mime, constructivist sets, musical scores and formalized scenery. His scenic invention and use of cinematic techniques culminated in his 1926 staging of Gogol’s The Government Inspector as well as reinterpretations of classics such as Pushkin’s Queen of Spades. Braun, a drama professor in England, sees Meyerhold as a supreme director-poet for whom the theater was designed to shatter the audience’s complacency. Decked out with 145 photographs of set reproductions, costumes and posters, Braun’s vibrant study restores Meyerhold’s radical legacy for contemporary theater. This revision of a work first published in 1979 draws on a wealth of newly discovered writings by Meyerhold, as well as KGB files released since 1989 that tell the full story of the director’s arrest, torture and execution after being falsely labeled a foreign agent by Stalin.” (Source)

Originally published in 1979
Second, revised and expanded, edition
Publisher Methuen Drama, 1995
ISBN 0413727300
347 pages

Reviews: Sharon Marie Carnicke (Modern Drama, 1996), Christine Kiebuzinska (Theatre Journal, 1996), Phil Shannon (Green Left Weekly, 1999).

PDF (33 MB)

Eccentric Manifesto (1922/1992)

“The ‘Depot of Eccentrics’ which on the 9th July 1922 published The Eccentric Manifesto–a pamphlet ‘the size of an ordinary letter’–proved an ephemeral collaboration. In the words of subsequent critics, ‘difference of opinion’, ‘stern criticism’ caused its dissolution soon after The Factory of Eccentric Actor’s first productions–a stage version of Gogol’s The Wedding (1922) and a Cocteau inspired piece in three acts, Foreign Trade on the Eiffel Tower (1923).

A great rarity, the manifesto itself does not seem to have been any more influential than the ‘depot’ which published it. Containing four articles–by Leonid Trauberg, Grigori Kozintsev, Sergei Yutkevich and professional gambler Georgii Kryzhitskii–its post-civil war Petrograd print issue was limited to 1000 copies. Of these ‘a majority’ were entrusted by Yutkevich to Pravda critic Khrisanf Khersonsky to spread around Moscow ‘using his contacts’. Sales went badly however and the whole stock was dumped in Khersonsky’s basement where, when the house caught fire, it was ‘completely destroyed.’

[…] Kozintsev and Trauberg later made the film New Babylon (1929), subtitled “Assault on the Heavens–episodes from the Franco Prussian War and the Paris Commune 1870-71”, based less on Karl Marx than on the history of the Paris Commune written by P.O. Lissagaray. [The screenings were accompanied with an ensemble playing a score by Dmitri Shostakovich]. … In later years Shostakovich was to claim that ‘my troubles on the political front began with New Babylon.'” (from the Introduction)

First published in Russian in St Petersburg, 1922
Translated and with an Introduction by Marek Pytel
Cover by Clifford Harper
Publisher Eccentric Press, London, 1992
22 pages
via Reality

Entry on Factory of Eccentricity in Saint Petersburg Encyclopedia (in English)

Publisher

PDF (lo-res), GIF images
Title page of Russian edition