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Utopian Reality: Reconstructing Culture in Revolutionary Russia and Beyond (Russian History and Culture)

This collection of essays deals broadly with the visual and cultural manifestation of utopian aspirations in Russia of the 1920s and 1930s, while examining the before- and after-life of such ideas both geographically and chronologically. The studies document the pluralism of Russian and Soviet culture at this time as well as illuminating various cultural strategies adopted by officialdom. The result serves to complicate the excessively simplistic narrative that avant-garde dreams were suddenly and brutally crushed by Soviet repression and to contest the notion of the avant-garde's complicity in Stalinism. Naturally, some essays document episodes in the defeat and dismantling of utopian projects, but others trace the persistence of avant-garde ideas and the astonishing tenacity of creative individuals who managed to retain their personal integrity while continuing to serve the cause of Soviet power.

Contributors include: John E. Bowlt, Natalia Budanova, David Crowley, Evgeny Dobrenko, Maria Kokkori, Christina Lodder, Muireann Maguire, Nicholas Bueno de Mesquita, Maria Mileeva, John Milner, Nicoletta Misler, Maria Starkova-Vindman, Brandon Taylor, and Maria Tsantsanoglou.

About the Author

Christina Lodder is Professor of the History and Philosophy of Art at the University of Kent. Her publications include Russian Constructivism (1983), Constructing Modernity: The Art and Career of Naum Gabo (with Martin Hammer, 2000), Gabo on Gabo (co-editor, 2000), Constructive Strands in Russian Art (2005) and Rethinking Malevich (co-editor, 2007).

Maria Kokkori is a research fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago. She received her Ph.D. in 2008 at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she completed a postdoctoral fellowship with a focus on Russian Constructivism. Her latest research project explores Kazimir Malevich's teaching activities at the Vitebsk Art School in Belarus between 1919 and 1923.

Maria Mileeva is an Early Career Lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where she completed her PhD in 2011. Her latest research project explores the discourse of centre and periphery in Soviet cultural and institutional history by looking at a network of regional art museums in Tbilisi, Yerevan, Baku, Kiev, Saratov and Kazan.

Product details

Series: Russian History and Culture (Book 14)
Hardcover: 271 pages
Publisher: Brill Academic Pub (October 24, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9004263209
ISBN-13: 978-9004263208
Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 1 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds