Konstantin Akinsha: The Second Life of Soviet Photomontage, 1935-1980s (2012)

“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

Publisher
Author

PDF (29 MB)

Peter Gay: Weimar Culture: The Outsider As Insider (1968–) [EN, CR]

First published in 1968, Weimar Culture is one of the masterworks of Peter Gay’s career. A study of German culture between the two wars, the book brilliantly traces the rise of the artistic, literary, and musical culture that bloomed ever so briefly in the 1920s amid the chaos of Germany’s tenuous post-World War I democracy, and crashed violently in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power. Despite the ephemeral nature of the Weimar democracy, the influence of its culture was profound and far-reaching, ushering in a modern sensibility in the arts that dominated Western culture for most of the twentieth century.

First published by Harper & Row, New York, 1968.
Publisher W. W. Norton, 2001
ISBN 0393322394, 9780393322392
205 pages
via chef

Review (Walter Laquer, The New York Times Books, 1968)
Review (Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Spectator, 1969)
Review (Sterling Fishman, History of Education Quarterly, 1970)

Publisher

Weimar Culture: The Outsider As Insider (English, 1968/2001, EPUB)
Weimarksa kultura: Isključenik kao uključenik (Croatian, trans. Danja Šilović-Karić, 1999, added on 2014-8-3)

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.