Dostoevsky and the Ballets Russes: Images of Savagery and Spirituality in the British Response to Russian Culture, 1911 – 1929 (original) (raw)
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Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Art Studies: Science, Experience, Education (ICASSEE 2018), 2018
The following article deals with how Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes enterprise was perceived in England after the First World War, with a focus on ballets choreographed by Leonide Massine and designed by Mikhail Larionov. Larionov's collage Homage to Roger Fry (1919, Victoria & Albert Museum, London) served as a point of departure in this research [1]. The history of this work and its possible interpretations are of interest not only in themselves: the context in which the Homage appeared had to do with the specifics of Diaghilev's ballets of the second postwar period, which turned out to be in line with relevant problems of British criticism and art of the second half of the 1910s.
The Russian Century: The Literary, Visual, and Performing Arts, 1800–1917 (Yale, 2016)
During the long nineteenth century, Russia experienced an unprecedented flourishing of the arts, as its relatively under-and unevenly-developed institutions of culture evolved rapidly to enable, accommodate, hinder, or otherwise shape a national artistic tradition of startling range and lasting impact: from the literary masterpieces of Pushkin and Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and the foundational import of the Peredvizhniki and the Mighty Five, to the creative innovations of Petipa, Chekhov, the Abramtsevo colony, and countless others. Following the October Revolution, this nineteenth-century canon continued to impact Soviet culture, forming the core of a shared self-consciously non-western and non-modernist cultural mythology. This tradition also supplied the central texts and objects for the first generation of Russianists in the West, a phenomenon perhaps most evident in the predominance of the classic Russian novel in American Slavic Studies. Towards the end of the last century, the discipline witnessed a turn away from this classical tradition and toward a rigorous rethinking of Soviet history and culture. This conference proposes that it is time we turn a renewed critical gaze to the literature, art, music, and theater of Russia's long nineteenth-century. In contemporary Russia the classical canon is rapidly being recast for the projection of a twenty-first century national identity, whether in the new collected volumes of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the blockbuster exhibitions of Fedotov and Serov, or the cinematic adaptations of works by Gogol and others. Concurrently, historians of Russian culture are turning to new theoretical perspectives and interdisciplinary methodologies that promise to undo some of the period's calcified interpretative commonplaces and to bring into sharper relief those parts of the Russian nineteenth-century tradition that have remained understudied or largely invisible outside of Russia.
Cultural Colonialism and Resistance in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novels
The Criterion , 2021
The Russian obsession with European culture, predominantly French and English, is not a recent phenomenon. The nation of Russia was always straddled between the two continents of Asia and Europe, and this peculiar geographical position extended into the cultural domain as well. In my Paper, I will be specifically exploring the novel Anna Karenina (1878) by Leo Tolstoy and the novels Crime and Punishment (1866) and Devils (1871) by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Through my Paper, I will be exploring how seminal writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky wrestled with the cultural crisis in the nineteenth century Russia brought about by the influx of European ideas such as nihilism, utilitarianism, socialism, atheism etc into the Russian mainland. Keywords: Colonialism, Novels, Ideology, Russian Orthodox Church, Nihilism, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Christianity, Socialism.
The Revolutionary Aesthetics of the Second Russian Avant-Garde
Appeared in: "Russian Studies in Literature", Volume 53, 2017, Issue 2: Avant-Garde and Revolutionary Aesthetics, Routledge (Taylor & Francis), pp. 172-200. *** The text focuses on the Stiob (the Russian word for a particular form of parody) and subversive aesthetic praxis of the Second Russian Avant-Garde. In particular, Ioffe analyzes Michail Grobman’s oeuvre from the perspective of various irreverent techniques associated with the political left and the cynic tradition, drawing a conceptual parallel between the avant-garde’s life-creational outrage and Surrealist patterns of discursive terror. The author reflects on the synthetic nature of the avant-garde, which puts equal emphasis on visual and verbal arts. His analysis explores the radical artistic gesture that represents one of the unique contributions of this cultural paradigm.