Maiakovskii and the Mobile Monument: Alternatives to Iconoclasm in Russian Culture (original) (raw)
The notion of the frame in art can refer not only to a material frame bordering an image, but also to a conceptual frame. Both meanings are essential to how the work is perceived. In Framing Russian Art, I investigate the role of the frame in its literal function of demarcating a work of art and in its conceptual function affectingthe understanding of what is seen. The first part of the book is dedicated to the framework of the Russian icon. Here, I explore the historical and cultural meanings of the icon's, setting, and of the iconostasis. Then my study moves through Russian and European art from ancient times to the twentieth century, including abstract art and Suprematism. Along the way, I pay special attention to the Russian baroque period and the famous nineteenth century Russian battle painter Vasily Vereshchagin. This enlightening account of the cultural phenomenon of the frame and its ever-changing functions will appeal to students and scholars of Russian art history.
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.
Poets and the City: Locating the Political in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russian Poetry. Introduction
Russian Literature, 2017
This introductory essay summarizes the political and theoretical backgrounds of poetry of the twentieth century and provides an overview of the contributions to this special triple issue on Poetry and Politics. Taking the Platonic idiosyncrasy towards poetry and the State ('Republic') as its dialectical departure point, the substance and matter of the volume encompasses several characteristic case studies which appear to be highly relevant in this context. This special issue deals with the oeuvre of such iconic Russian poets as Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Daniil Kharms, Dmitrii Prigov, Arkadii Dragomoschenko and many others. Special attention is paid to the general issue of ideology and the Russian Avant-Garde pragmatics of shocking action related to Futurism and early Soviet culture.
Resurrecting Pushkin: Mayakovsky's Struggle for Poetic Immortality
2021
Though they lived a century apart and wrote in starkly disparate historical, cultural, and literary contexts, Russian poets Aleksandr Pushkin and Vladimir Mayakovsky were both victims of the posthumous processes of bureaucratization and monumentalization at the hands of the Soviet regime. Their biographies, politics, and poetry were sanitized and manipulated for use as state propaganda. This dissertation synthesizes several scholarly approaches including theories of poetry, close reading of prosody and metaphor, and analysis of biographical and cultural context in order to analyze Mayakovsky's relationship with Pushkin and his legacy. Ultimately, I argue that Mayakovsky uses his poetry both as a means of "resurrecting" Pushkin from his posthumous stagnation and as his own "immortalization program"-a plan through which Mayakovsky hoped to be similarly resurrected by his descendants and rescued from his second death as a lifeless monument of "marble slime." Much of my analysis centers on Mayakovsky's treatment of the Pushkinian themes of the monument and the destructive statue, which appear throughout his oeuvre in many different forms and provide a wealth of information about Mayakovsky's concerns regarding his relationship with Pushkin and his own poetic immortality.
Icon and devotion: sacred spaces in Imperial Russia
Choice Reviews Online, 2003
Some books enlighten and disappoint at the same time. This is how I felt having read Oleg Tarasov's book. Originally Tarasov's doktorskaia dissertatsiia (the second PhD), the book was first published in Russian and has now been painstakingly translated by Robin Milner-Gulland and lavishly published by Reaktion Books. The book deals with the changing place and meaning of the Russian icon in the Imperial period (from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century). But in a broader sense the book is about complex exchanges between cultures and the construction of cultural myths.