Sergei Tretyakov: Field Commanders (original) (raw)
Related papers
"WHERE I HAVE BEEN WITH MY CAMERA": SERGEI TRET'IAKOV AND DEVELOPING OPERATIVITY
Russian Literature, 2019
Focusing primarily on his work after 1929, this article traces Sergei Tret'iakov as an "operative author". Tret'iakov's writing practice, shaped by the camera apparatus , embodied and dominated text and image production in the mid-1930s. The article brings Tret'iakov's writing on photography and the ocherk, including his contributions to Sovetskoe foto, Pioner, and book-length collections featuring his photography, into dialogue with his contemporaries, especially Mikhail Prishvin and Leonid Leonov, and illustrates photography's shifting role in the codification of Socialist Realism. It suggests the expansive reach of Tret'iakov's "operative-eye" as a model practice beyond his death.
Slavic Review , 2017
In 1924, the self-taught artist Iurii Nikolaevich Rozhkov created a series of photomontages inspired by Vladimir Maiakovskii's poem “To the Workers of Kursk” and the geological discovery of the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly (KMA). Rozhkov's series for Maiakovskii's ode to labor is both an example of the political propaganda of the reconstruction period of the NEP era and a polemical answer to all those who relentlessly attacked Maiakovskii and criticized avant-garde art as alien to the masses. The article introduces Rozhkov's less-known photomontage series as a new model of the avant-garde photopoetry book, which offers a sequential reading of Maiakovskii's poem and functions as a cinematic dispositive of the early Soviet agitprop apparatus (dispositif). Bošković argues that the photopoem itself converts into an idiosyncratic avant-garde de-mountable memorial to the working class: a dynamic cine-dispositive through which the the early agitprop apparatus is realized in lived experience, reproduced, and transformed, thus delineating its shift towards the new dispositif of the late 1920s—socialist realism.
Interlitteraria, 2020
The article focuses on the film House of Fools (Dom Durakov, 2002) of Andrei Konchalovsky, who is one of the most recognized contemporary Russian directors. The selected work is analyzed from the point of view of its intertextual relationships with Russian literary texts and cultural phenomena. The motif of the train, the paradigm of jurodivyj and the reference to the artistic worlds of acclaimed Russian writers (Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Vyrypaev) are among the main parallels which are discussed in the publication. The eclectic nature of the film allows treating it as a cultural archive founded on the storage capacity of the cultural memory. In the context of war, the sphere of art and the imagined can be seen as the most stable reality.
The Author as Photographer: Tret'iakov's, Erenburg's, and Il'f's Images of the West
Configurations, 2010
The essay considers the role of photography in the work of the early Soviet writers Sergei Tret’iakov, Il’ia Erenburg, and Il’ia Il’f in terms of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Author as Producer.” Identifying Tret’iakov as a model for emulation, Benjamin described the revolutionary transformation of the role of the author and the nature of literary work. Calling for the overthrown of “the barrier between writing and image,” Benjamin exhorted writers to take up photography. Committed to creating a distinct Soviet literature, these authors turned to explicitly journalistic forms and incorporated photography into their publications. Using a Leica camera, each created a significant body of photographic work, much of it featuring non-Soviet subjects. The essay examines Tret’iakov’s photographs of a collective farm in the Caucasus and of Hamburg, Erenburg’s photo-book My Paris, and Il’f’s photographs of the United States, relating this photographic literary work to related developments in Soviet literature that accompanied the rise of Socialist Realism during the 1930s.
Russian History
This essay responds to Jeffrey Brooks’ 2020 monograph The Firebird and the Fox, drawing attention to Brooks’ emphasis on a set of cultural symbols persistent during the historical period he surveys, and on the social activism which he identifies with leading Russian cultural figures such as Tolstoi and Chekhov. In support of Brooks’ argument, I present the example of Aleksandr Chaianov (1888–1937), a specialist in agronomy and amateur writer whose reputation as a driver of early Soviet agricultural policy was overshadowed by his arrest in 1930 and subsequent exile and execution. Chaianov’s social activism, as expressed in his short fiction and historical essays, took the form of reminding his readers about the cultural continuities between Russia’s past, present, and future.
Culture in Revolutionary Russia was subordinated to the goal of revolution; however, the works commissioned by the Stalinist government as works of Socialist realism are virtually forgotten today. The enduring works of art from the Soviet period are those that were at odds with this vision of a Communist utopia. Resurrected and preserved by the Russian people, the works that endure are those that preserve the tropes of classic Russian culture. Two of these enduring masterpieces are the novel, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov and, the film, Andrei Rublev by Andrei Tarkovsky. Through these narratives, we can glimpse why the Soviet revolution is a singular event in history, not organic to Russian culture. By exploring cultural patterns in Russian history through these two symbolic works of art, in retrospect, it seems obvious that the Bolshevik Revolution was doomed to fail.