From Symbolism to Socialist Realism

From Symbolism to Socialist Realism PDF

Author: Irene Masing-Delic

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781618112323

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Developed as a reader for upper division undergraduates and beginning graduates, From Symbolism to Socialist Realism offers broad variety of materials contextualizing the literary texts most frequently read in Russian literature courses at this level. These approaches range from critical-theoretical articles, cultural and historical analyses, literary manifestos and declarations of literary aesthetics, memoirs of revolutionary terrorism and arrests by the NKVD, political denunciations, and "literary vignettes" capturing the spirit of its particular time in a nutshell. The voices of this "polyphonic" reader are diverse: Briusov, Savinkov, Ivanov-Razumnik, Kollontai, Tsvetaeva, Shklovsky, Olesha, Zoshchenko, Zhdanov, Grossman, Evtushenko, and others. The range of specialists on Russian culture represented here is equally broad: Clark, Erlich, Grossman, Nilsson, Peace, Poznansky, Siniavskii, and others. Together they evoke and illuminate a complex and tragic era.

The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 1890-1934

The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 1890-1934 PDF

Author: Irina Gutkin

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9780810115453

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The past fifteen years have seen an important shift in the way scholars look at socialist realism. Where it was seen as a straitjacket imposed by the Stalinist regime, it is now understood to be an aesthetic movement in its own right, one whose internal logic had to be understood if it was to be criticized. International specialists remain divided, however, over the provenance of Soviet aesthetic ideology, particularly over the role of the avant-garde in its emergence. In The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, Irina Gutkin brings together the best work written on the subject to argue that socialist realism encompassed a philosophical worldview that marked thinking in the USSR on all levels: political, social, and linguistic. Using a wealth of diverse cultural material, Gutkin traces the emergence of the central tenants of socialist realist theory from Symbolism and Futurism through the 1920s and 1930s.

Political Economy of Socialist Realism

Political Economy of Socialist Realism PDF

Author: Evgeniĭ Aleksandrovich Dobrenko

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 0300122802

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Bringing together the Soviet historical experience and Stalin-era art in novels, films, poems, songs, painting, photography, architecture and advertising, Dobrenko examines Stalinism's representational strategies and demonstrates how real socialism was begotten of Socialist Realism.

The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature

The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature PDF

Author: Evgeny Dobrenko

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-02-17

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1139828231

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In Russian history, the twentieth century was an era of unprecedented, radical transformations - changes in social systems, political regimes, and economic structures. A number of distinctive literary schools emerged, each with their own voice, specific artistic character, and ideological background. As a single-volume compendium, the Companion provides a new perspective on Russian literary and cultural development, as it unifies both émigré literature and literature written in Russia. This volume concentrates on broad, complex, and diverse sources - from symbolism and revolutionary avant-garde writings to Stalinist, post-Stalinist, and post-Soviet prose, poetry, drama, and émigré literature, with forays into film, theatre, and literary policies, institutions and theories. The contributors present recent scholarship on historical and cultural contexts of twentieth-century literary development, and situate the most influential individual authors within these contexts, including Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Bulgakov and Anna Akhmatova.

Collective Body

Collective Body PDF

Author: Christina Kiaer

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2024-04-05

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 022682716X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, Collective Body presents painter Aleksandr Deineka's haptic and corporeal version of Socialist Realist figuration not as the enemy of revolutionary art, but as an alternate experimental aesthetic that, at its best, activates and organizes affective forces for collective ends. Tracing Deineka's path from his avant-garde origins as the inventor of the proletarian body in illustrations for mass magazines after the Revolution through his success as a state-sponsored painter of monumental, lyrical canvases during the Great Terror and beyond, Collective Body demonstrates that Socialist Realism is best understood not as a totalitarian style, but rather as a fiercely collective art system that organized art outside the market and formed part of the legacy of the revolutionary modernisms of the 1920s. Collective Body accounts for the way the art of the October Revolution continues to capture viewers' imaginations through the sheer intensity of its evocation of the elation of collectivity, making viewers not only comprehend but also truly feel socialism, and retaining the potential to inform our own art-into-life experiments within contemporary political art. Deineka figures in this study not as a singular master, in the spirit of a traditional monograph, but as a limited case of the system he inhabited and helped to create"--

How Life Writes the Book

How Life Writes the Book PDF

Author: Thomas Lahusen

Publisher:

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This remarkable volume is at once a history of a book and an attempt to come to terms with the traumatic experience of a man and his generation. Thomas Lahusen was doing research on Far from Moscow, a classic socialist realist novel by a writer named Vasilii Azhaev, when he made an astonishing discovery. Azhaev had assembled an extensive personal archive integrating his personal history with the political history of his time. Drawing on the archive, Lahusen reconstructs the genesis, writing, reworking, and reception of the Stalin Prize novel. He leads us from a forced labor camp to the highest reaches of the Soviet literary bureaucracy and back again, in the process helping us better to understand the failure of the bold Soviet effort to integrate literature and life, utopia and reality.

Symbolism and Politics

Symbolism and Politics PDF

Author: Graeme Gill

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-21

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1000727939

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Symbolism and Politics is a timely intervention into ongoing debates around the function of political symbols in a historical period characterized by volatile electoral behaviour, fragmented societies in search of collective identifications, and increasingly polarized political models. Symbols are central features of organized human life, helping to define perception, shaping the way we view the world and understand what goes on within it. But, despite this key role in shaping understanding, there is never a single interpretation of a symbol that everyone within the community will accept, and the way in which symbols can mobilize antagonistic political factions demonstrates that they are as much a central element in power struggles as they are avenues to facilitate processes of identification. This dual potential is the object of discussion in the chapters of this book, which sheds new light on our understanding of the political function of symbols in a historical period. Symbolism and Politics will be of great interest to scholars working on Political Symbols, Nationalism, Regime Change and Political Transitions. The chapters originally published as a special issue of Politics, Religion & Ideology.