This is the first book in the English language devoted to the life and art of Russia's national artist, Ilya Repin (1844 1930). Esteemed by both prerevolutionary and Soviet Russia, Repin is placed beside Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Musorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov for the magnitude of his contribution to Russia'a cultural heritage. Repin gave to Russia a wealth of canvases on contemporary and historical themes as well as many exceptional portraits of the noted personalities of his day. His paintings incl...
Stories of the secret underground Cold War–era Soviet music subculture that distributed forbidden music on used hospital x-rays. During the Cold War era, the songs that Soviet citizens could listen to were ruthlessly controlled by the state. But a secret underground subculture of music lovers and bootleggers defied the censors, building recording machines and making their own records of forbidden jazz, rock 'n' roll, and Russian music, cut onto used hospital x-ray film. Bone Music is the follow...
Moscou sur Seine
Magnificence of the Tsars
by Svetlana A. Amelekhina and Alexey Konstantinovich Levykin
The grandeur of Imperial Russia is captured in this spectacular book featuring the dress and uniforms of Emperors and officials of the Russian court. Starting in the 1730s with lavishly embroidered coats and elaborately patterned silk banyans from the wardrobe of Tsar Peter II and spanning a period of almost two centuries, these garments document a unique dialogue between military uniform, court dress, European fashion and traditional Russian costume. "Magnificence of the Tsars" celebrates the m...
The postsocialist contemporary joins a growing body of scholarship debating the definition and nature of contemporary art. It comes to these debates from a historicist perspective, taking as its point of departure one particular art programme, initiated in Eastern Europe by the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros. First implemented in Hungary, the Soros Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA) expanded to another eighteen ex-socialist countries throughout the 1990s. Its mission was to build a...
KinoSputniks closely analyse some key films from the history of Russian and Soviet cinema. Written by international experts in the field, they are intended for film enthusiasts and students, combining scholarship with an accessible style of writing. This KinoSputnik about Fedor Bondarchuk's megahit Stalingrad (2013) examines the production, context and reception of the film, whilst offering a detailed reading of its key themes. Fedor Bondarchuk’s 2013 blockbuster film Stalingrad shattered box-...
The history of contemporary art in Russia, from socialist realism to the post-Soviet alternative art scene. In The Museological Unconscious, Victor Tupitsyn views the history of Russian contemporary art through a distinctly Russian lens, a "communal optic" that registers the influence of such characteristically Russian phenomena as communal living, communal perception, and communal speech practices. This way of looking at the subject allows him to gather together a range of artists and art move...
This publication is dedicated to the history of Russian drawing and watercolours of the first half of the nineteenth century. The book is aimed at combining various methods of studying this vast material: chronological, genre, stylistic, artistic, analytic, historical and everyday. Drawing is presented here as an independent creative sphere as well as collaborating with other forms of art. The catalogue introduces individual peculiarities of outstanding artists of that period and researches draw...
Russian Art and the West (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies)
This book addresses the lively artistic dialogue that took place between Russia and the West—in particular with the United States, Britain, and France—from the 1860s to the Khrushchev Thaw. Offering stimulating new readings of cross-cultural exchange, it illuminates Russia's compelling, and sometimes combative, relation with western art in this period of profound cultural transformation. Russian Art and the West breaks new ground in the range of its material and its chronological span. Attending...
Explodity - Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art
by Nancy Perloff
Painters and poets-including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky-collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed books, for which they invented a new language called zaum (a neologism meaning "beyond the mind"), which was distinctive in its emphasis on "sound as such" and its rejection of definite logical meaning. At the heart of this volume are close analyses of two of the most significant and experimental futurist books: Mirskontsa (...
Russian painter Olga Suvorova is internationally known for her brilliant reinterpretations of English Pre-Rafaelite art, described by critic Viktoriya Syslova as "amazingly modern in their exquisite theatricality." Both exuberant and philosophical in mood, her richly detailed worlds depict people who are somehow familiar to us, even in their extravagant costumes. In this first-person account, accompanied by over 150 images of her colorful paintings, Suvorova describes her backgro...
This book examines the legacy of international interwar modernism as a case of cultural transfer through the travels of a central motif: the square. The square was the most emblematic and widely known form/motif of the international avant-garde in the interwar years. It originated from the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich who painted The Black Square on White Ground in 1915 and was then picked up by another Russian artist El Lissitzky and the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg. It came to be understo...
How Constructivist artists in Russia between 1923 and 1925 developed a counterproposal to capitalism's commodity fetish by producing objects meant to be "comrades" in the creation of an egalitarian socialist culture.In Imagine No Possessions, Christina Kiaer investigates the Russian Constructivist conception of objects as being more than commodities. "Our things in our hands must be equals, comrades," wrote Aleksandr Rodchenko in 1925. Kiaer analyzes this Constructivist counterproposal to capita...
My Life was written in Moscow in 1921-1922, when Chagall was thirty-five years old. Although long out-of-print, it remains one of the most extraordinarily inventive and beautifully told of all autobiographies. The text is accompanied by twenty plates which Chagall prepared especially to illustrate his life story. Together, the words and pictures paint an incomparable portrait of one of the greatest painters of this century, and of the now vanished milieu which inspired him.
The subject of Russian Futurism is familiar only to experts, and based on highly limited material. No other movement appears to have evoked quite the same public response, having, as it does, social roots. Referred to as "the art of the future" by the Russian press in 1908 - a year before the official appearance of the word - this book focuses on the works of some forty-two artistic 'revolutionaries' featuring vibrant examples of their work, which serve to inspire the imagination. The work of Da...
Great Private Collections of Imperial Russia
by Oleg Yakovlevich Neverov
Prior to the Revolution of 1917, Russia had one of the greatest traditions of private art collecting in the world. The first great collections were created by the aristocracy, and then by the newly rich industrialists and businessmen in the 19th century. Finally came the 'Merchant Princes', who were among the first and most important collectors of Impressionist and Modern Art. After 1917, all these collections were confiscated by the State, put into reserves in Moscow and Leningrad, and eventual...