Cosmic Shift: Russian Contemporary Art Writing (2017)

“In this, the first anthology of Russian contemporary art writing to be published outside Russia, many of the country’s most prominent contemporary artists, writers, philosophers, curators and historians come together to examine the region’s various movements of contemporary art, culture, and theory, from communism, cosmism and conceptualism to past and future futures.

With contributions from Barte de Baere, Boris Groys, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Anton Vidokle, Bogdan Mamonov, Pavel Pepperstein, Dmitri Prigov and Masha Sumnina amongst many others, this definitive collection reveals a compelling portrait of a vast and complex nation built on a contradicting dialectic between the material and the ideal and a culture battling its own histories and ideologies.”

Edited by Elena Zaytseva and Alex Anikina
Foreword by Bart De Baere
Publisher Zed Books, London, 2017
ISBN 9781786993243, 1786993244
xvii+516 pages

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Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969): An Avant-Garde for the Proletariat (2011) [EN, ES]

“This is the first exhibition and publication to present this outstanding figure of socialist realism – and, by extension, the historical period from which his work was borne – in a twofold context: the end of the avant-garde and the advent of Soviet socialist realism. It covers Deineka’s entire oeuvre, from his early paintings of the 1920s to the twilight of his career in the 1950s, when the dreamlike quality of his first works gave way to the harsh materiality of everyday life, the life in which the utopian ideals of socialism seemed to materialize. Combining Deineka’s graphic work, posters and contributions to illustrated magazines and books with his monumental paintings, this catalogue displays a variety of subjects: factories and enthusiastic masses, athletes and farmers, the ideal and idyllic image of Soviet life.”

With essays by Manuel Fontán del Junco, Christina Kiaer, Ekaterina Degot, Boris Groys, Fredric Jameson, Irina Leytes, and Alessandro De Magistris. Includes an extensive section with documents of the Russian avant-garde, Revolutionary Art and Socialist Realism (1913-35) and texts by and about Deineka (1918-64).

Publisher Fundación Juan March, Madrid, 2011
ISBN 9788470755927, 8470755927
440 pages

Exhibition
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Deineka: An Avant-Garde for the Proletariat (English, 30 MB)
Deineka: Una vanguardia para el proletariado (Spanish, 30 MB)

Alexei Yurchak: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2005–) [EN, RU]

“Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of ‘late socialism’ (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period.

The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self, truth and lie–and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.”

Publisher Princeton University Press, 2005
In-Formation series
ISBN 0691121168, 9780691121161
x+331 pages

Reviews: Gleb Tsipursky (Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 2005), Sheila Fitzpatrick (London Review of Books, 2006), John P. Ziker (American Anthropologist, 2006), Luahona Ganguly (Int’l J Communication, 2007), Christian Noack (H-Soz-u-Kult, 2007, DE), Christoph Neidhart (J Cold War Studies, 2010).

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Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (English, 2005, EPUB)
Eto bylo navsegda, poka ne konchilos (Russian, trans. A. Belyaev, 2014, 15 MB)