Romantic Subversions of Soviet Enlightenment: Questioning Socialism's Realism (Princeton University, 2014) (original) (raw)
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SYMPOSIUM: LANDSCAPES OF SOCIALISM: ROMANTIC ALTERNATIVES TO SOVIET ENLIGHTENMENT 1. Serguei Alex Oushakine Sotzromantizm and Its Theaters of Life: Editor's Introduction 2. Fabien Bellat An Uneasy Metamorphosis: The Afterlife of Constructivism in Stalinist Gardens 3. Juliana Maxim Building the Collective: Theories of the Archaic in Socialist Modernism, Romania circa 1958 4. Mari Laanemets In Search of a Humane Environment: Environment, Identity, and Design in the 1960s–70s 5. Oliver Sukrow Subversive Landscapes: The Symbolic Representation of Socialist Landscapes in the Visual Arts of the German Democratic Republic 6. Alexey Golubev “A Wonderful Song of Wood”: Heritage Architecture and the Search for Historical Authenticity in North Russia 7. Elena Gapova “The Land under the White Wings”: The Romantic Landscaping of Socialist Belarus The contents of the first issue of volume 29 of Rethinking Marxism are reflections on the relation between space and society. They all explore how the imaginations of particular historical eras take shape in space. In that spirit, we start the volume with a symposium, “Landscapes of Socialism: Romantic Alternatives to Soviet Enlightenment,” edited by Serguei A. Oushakine, on architecture, art, and landscape design in former socialist countries, and exploring the relation between these historical forms and transformations in society. In “Sotzromantizm and Its Theaters of Life,” Serguei A. Oushakine contextualizes the contributions to the symposium. He starts his narrative with a reference to a visionary of Soviet architecture, to El Lissitzky’s manifesto, wherein the leading constructivist set out the spatial imagination of suprematism, which would shape the new world of socialism. In this utterly radical imagining, the reshaping of the world would take place through the “rhythmic” dissection of space and time into meaningfully organized units, which would move together with the transformation of the tools of representation, resulting in what Lissitzky named a “new theater of life.” Oushakine argues that the utopian radicalism of the constructivists remained—despite the industrialization embarked on in 1928—with leading architects such as Moisei Ginzburg and Mikhail Barshch designing Moscow as a “green city” that would be transformed into a huge park; this would be realized in an economical way with a view to solving the problems of the big city, such as dense traffic. The new imagination represented both a desire for a radical break with and erasure of the past and also a refusal to inherit. The contributions to the symposium, argues Oushakine, develop more critical and complex stories of this “historical nihilism” of Soviet modernity. Each points to how this original refusal to claim history gave way to historicizing and historicist perspectives. These disparate ways of alluding to the past are aggregated under the name of Sotzromantizm, in which the spatial vision of early Soviet modernity synthesized with influences of the past, a seminal reference being made by Anna Elistratova in 1957 when the author questioned Socialist realism, pointing at the romantic traditions as possible sources of inspiration. Sotzromantizm, argues Oushakine, flowed in the works of architects, artists, and writers in diverse forms, creating a new “politico-poetical theater of life” and along the way providing alternatives to the rationalism of Soviet Enlightenment.
Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 2001
eliminate the not infrequent mistakes and typos. The illustrations should be more closely integrated with the argumentation and analysis.. This is an interesting and substantial collection of articles. What it is not, however, is a post-Soviet primer on post-modernism. While the oppositions evident in the topics discussed above fit the current popular framework of conflicting "constructed identities," for the most part this interpretive matrix can either be replaced by older interpretive frameworks with no less, and probably more, explanatory power or is not actually practiced in the articles. The arguments about "constructed identity" by Schleifman and Holquist could just as easily be recast as pursuit of economic selfinterest by locality, center, and Cossackry respectively in an explanatory matrix that predates Marx. Engel presents a case for inclusion of women, using post-modernist terminology-"problematize the narrative"-but otherwise not distinguished from longstanding arguments of feminists. The articles on the Orthodox Church and multiparty politics are straightforward historical narratives with barely a nod to postmodernism. Kosach's article most comfortably assumes the contours of postmodernist argumentation. This is not accidental. T'he post-modernist approach works best when its subject is un-self-conscious. In both Mozhaisk and with the Cossackry folk are pursuing the time-honored practice of naked self-interest, so pointing out that the emperor has no clothes is not particularly revelatory. That does not mean that post-modernism is inapplicable to either Mozhaisk or Cossackry, but it does mean that the sources utilized should come from ordinary people who are un-self-conscious representatives of the Mozhaisk sacredotal vision or the Cossack claim for ethnicity. This collection is valuable because of the content of the articles, and it would have been better had it not been stretched to fit a post-modernist mold..
Rethinking Marxism, 2017
The introduction offers the notion of Sotzromantizm (socialist romanticism) as a way of framing critical engagements with the actually existing socialism of the 1950s–1980s. Large-scale historicizing projects relied on the romantic re-appropriation of space to generate versions of identity, social communities, spiritual values, and relations to the past that significantly differed from the rationalistic canons of the perfectly planned socialist society. As the introduction argues, Sotzromantizm offers us a ground from which to challenge the emerging dogma that depicts late socialist society as a space where pragmatic cynics coexisted with useful idiots of the regime. Instead, the concept allows us to shift attention to ideas, institutions, spaces, objects, and identities that enabled (rather than prevented) individual and collective involvement with socialism.
From Angels to Demons: Mikhail Vrubel and the Search for a Modernist Idiom Maria Taroutina
Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives, 2017
In 1911 Vasily Kandinsky published the first edition of ‘On the Spiritual in Art’, a landmark modernist treatise in which he sought to reframe the meaning of art and the true role of the artist. For many artists of late Imperial Russia – a culture deeply influenced by the regime’s adoption of Byzantine Orthodoxy centuries before – questions of religion and spirituality were of paramount importance. As artists and the wider art community experimented with new ideas and interpretations at the dawn of the twentieth century, their relationship with ‘the spiritual’ – broadly defined – was inextricably linked to their roles as pioneers of modernism. This diverse collection of essays introduces new and stimulating approaches to the ongoing debate as to how Russian artistic modernism engaged with questions of spirituality in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Ten chapters from emerging and established voices offer new perspectives on Kandinsky and other familiar names, such as Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Larionov, and Natalia Goncharova, and introduce less well-known figures, such as the Georgian artists Ucha Japaridze and Lado Gudiashvili, and the craftswoman and art promoter Aleksandra Pogosskaia. Prefaced by a lively and informative introduction by Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow that sets these perspectives in their historical and critical context, Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives enriches our understanding of the modernist period and breaks new ground in its re-examination of the role of religion and spirituality in the visual arts in late Imperial Russia. Of interest to historians and enthusiasts of Russian art, culture, and religion, and those of international modernism and the avant-garde, it offers innovative readings of a history only partially explored, revealing uncharted corners and challenging long-held assumptions.