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Author: Julia Bekman Chadaga
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: 2014-10-31
Total Pages: 332
ISBN-13: 0810130033
DOWNLOAD EBOOKChadaga's ambitious study proceeds from the idea that glass - in its uses as a material object and as it was depicted in works of art - is a key to understanding the evolution of Russian identity from the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth.
Author: Yulia Karpova
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2020-02-28
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 1526139863
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to have been Russia’s first truly original contribution to world culture. In contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hack-work and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities. This book offers a new perspective on the history of Soviet design by focusing on the notion of the comradely object as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet design inherited from the avant-garde. It introduces a shared history of domestic objects, hand-made as well as machine made, mass-produced as well as unique, utilitarian as well as challenging the conventional notion of utility. This is a study of post-avant-garde Russian productivism at the intersection of intellectual history, social history and material culture studies, an account attentive to the complexities and contradictions of Soviet design.
Author: Eleanor Rees
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2022-12-15
Total Pages: 281
ISBN-13: 1350246379
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book highlights the significant role that production artists played when Russian cinema was still in its infancy. It uncovers Russian cinema's connections with other art forms, examining how production artists drew on both aesthetic traditions and modernist experiments in architecture, painting and theatre as they explored the new medium of cinema and its potential to engender new models of perception and forms of audience engagement. Drawing on set design sketches, archival documents and film-makers' memoirs, Eleanor Rees reveals how less-canonical films such as Behind the Screen (Kulisy ekrana, 1919) and Palace and Fortress (Dvorets i krepost ́, 1923), were remarkable from a design perspective, and also provides new readings of well-known films, such as Children of the Age (Deti veka, 1915) and Strike (Stachka, 1925). Rees brings to light information on significant but understudied figures such as Vladimir Egorov and Sergei Kozlovskii, and highlights the involvement of well-known figures such as Lev Kuleshov and Aleksandr Rodchenko. Unlike the majority of late Imperial directors and camera operators, many early-Russian production artists continued to work in cinema in the Soviet era and to draw on practices forged before the 1917 Revolution. In spanning the entire silent era, this book highlights the often overlooked continuities between the late-Imperial and early-Soviet periods of cinema, thus questioning traditional historical periodisations.
Author: Lilya Kaganovsky
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2018-02-13
Total Pages: 295
ISBN-13: 0253032660
DOWNLOAD EBOOK1. This book presents the untold story of the role the emergence of cinematic sound had on Soviet politics and culture. The author contextualizes media technologies in the midst of the political and cultural environment of the early Soviet era. 2. The author is a returning IUP author who is extremely active in both Slavic studies and film and media studies. 3. This book with have a market among both film and Russian/East European studies scholars and is a strong contribution to IUPs growing international film history lists.
Author: Stephen Eskilson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2018-02-08
Total Pages: 249
ISBN-13: 1474278388
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGlass has long transformed the architectural landscape. From the Crystal Palace through to the towering glass spires of today's cities, few architectural materials have held such immense symbolic resonance in the modern era. The Age of Glass explores the cultural and technological ascension of glass in modern and contemporary architecture. Showing how the use of glass is driven as much by changing cultural concerns as it is by developments in technology and style, it traces the richly interwoven material, symbolic, and ideological histories of glass to show how it has produced and dispersed meaning in architecture over the past two centuries. The book's chapters focus on key moments within the modern history of architecture, moments when glass came to the forefront of architectural thought, and which illustrate how glass has been used at different times to project different cultural ideas. A wide range of topics are explored – from the tension between expressionism and functionalism, to the persistent theme of glass and social class, to how glass has reflected political ideas from Nazism through to today's global consumer capitalism. The book also grapples with current arguments about sustainability, while, taking into account the advent of digital LED screens and 'smart glass', offering new cultural perspectives on the future and asking what glass architecture will signify in the digital age. Combining close readings of buildings with insights drawn from research, plus good storytelling and strong contemporary relevance, The Age of Glass offers a fascinating new perspective on modern architecture and culture.
Author: Mark D. Steinberg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-09-23
Total Pages: 153
ISBN-13: 1350127191
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWinner of the 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Titles Mark D. Steinberg explores the work of individuals he recognizes as utopians during the most dramatic period in Russian and Soviet history. It has long been a cliché to argue that Russian revolutionary movements have been inspired by varieties of 'utopian dreaming' – claims which, although not wrong, are too often used uncritically. For the first time, Russian Utopian digs deeper and asks what utopians meant at the level of ideas, emotions, and lived experience. Despite the fact that many would have resisted the 'utopian' label at the time because of its dismissive meanings, Steinberg's comprehensive approach sees him take in political leaders, intellectuals, writers, and artists (visual, material, and musical), as well as workers, peasants, soldiers, students and others. Ideologically, the figures discussed range from reactionaries to anarchists, nationalists (including non-Russians) to feminists, both religious believers and 'the militant godless'. This innovative text dissects the very notion of the Russian utopian and examines its significance in its various fascinating contexts.
Author: Alexey Golubev
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2020-12-15
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 1501752898
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Things of Life is a social and cultural history of material objects and spaces during the late socialist era. It traces the biographies of Soviet things, examining how the material world of the late Soviet period influenced Soviet people's gender roles, habitual choices, social trajectories, and imaginary aspirations. Instead of seeing political structures and discursive frameworks as the only mechanisms for shaping Soviet citizens, Alexey Golubev explores how Soviet people used objects and spaces to substantiate their individual and collective selves. In doing so, Golubev rediscovers what helped Soviet citizens make sense of their selves and the world around them, ranging from space rockets and model aircraft to heritage buildings, and from home gyms to the hallways and basements of post-Stalinist housing. Through these various materialist fascinations, The Things of Life considers the ways in which many Soviet people subverted the efforts of the Communist regime to transform them into a rationally organized, disciplined, and easily controllable community. Golubev argues that late Soviet materiality had an immense impact on the organization of the Soviet historical and spatial imagination. His approach also makes clear the ways in which the Soviet self was an integral part of the global experience of modernity rather than simply an outcome of Communist propaganda. Through its focus on materiality and personhood, The Things of Life expands our understanding of what made Soviet people and society "Soviet."
Author: Julia Bekman Chadaga
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: 2014-10-31
Total Pages: 332
ISBN-13: 0810167883
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLonglist finalist, 2015 Historia Nova Prize for Best Book on Russian Intellectual and Cultural History Julia Bekman Chadaga’s ambitious study posits that glass—in its uses as a material and as captured in culture—is a key to understanding the evolution of Russian identity from the eighteenth century onward. From the contemporary perspective, it is easy to overlook how glass has profoundly transformed vision. Chadaga shows the far-reaching effects of this phenomenon. Her book examines the similarities between glass and language, the ideological uses of glass, and the material’s associations with modernity, while illuminating the work of Lomonosov, Dostoevsky, Zamyatin, and Eisenstein, among others. In particular, Chadaga explores the prominent role of glass in the discourse around Russia’s contentious relationship with the West—by turns admiring and antagonistic—as the nation crafted a vision for its own future. Chadaga returns throughout to the spectacular aspect of glass and shows how both the tendentious capacity and the playfulness of this material have shaped Russian culture.
Author: Dustin Condren
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2024-12-15
Total Pages: 391
ISBN-13: 150177848X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn Imaginary Cinema is the first systematic study of Sergei Eisenstein's unrealized films as well as a deeply informed historical and theoretical inquiry into the role and meaning of the unmade in his oeuvre. Eisenstein directed some of the twentieth century's most important films, from the early classic of montage, Battleship Potemkin, to his late masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible. Alongside these, however, the Soviet filmmaker also toiled over a compelling array of unrealized projects, from ideas that never grew beyond complex, passionate notebook scrawls and sketches to productions that were mounted and shot to some degree of completion without ever being finished. Working from the archival remnants of several of the director's most fascinating unrealized projects—from his bold vision to film Marx's Das Kapital to his time in Hollywood struggling to adapt Dreiser's An American Tragedy—Dustin Condren's book reveals new aspects of Eisenstein's genius, showing the filmmaker in a constant state of process, open to working toward impossible and sometimes utopian ends, and committed to the pursuit of creative and theoretical discovery. Condren's analysis of these unrealized projects in An Imaginary Cinema reveals Eisenstein at crucial moments of his personal and artistic biography, and it also tells the wider story of a canonical artist negotiating the political labyrinths of Stalinist Russia, the economic pitfalls of Hollywood, and the technological shifts of early cinema.
Author: Thomas Seifrid
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2023-10-02
Total Pages: 222
ISBN-13: 1487551827
DOWNLOAD EBOOKStaging the Absolute argues that an array of practices and beliefs came together to define an essential aspect of Russian and Soviet culture in the twentieth century: the persistent desire to interrupt – or disrupt – history. Drawing on sources that define the nature of public rituals, the book reveals the pervasive presence of the impulse to impede history in Russia’s modern era and the realization of the idea in the form of the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s. Thomas Seifrid analyses Soviet festivals, public displays of agitational propaganda, and urban planning, together with such modernist precursors as fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century projects for reviving the theatre, modernist adaptations of puppet theatre, the Faust legend and its vogue in early twentieth-century Russia, and the nineteenth-century panorama. The book reveals that what binds these otherwise disparate phenomena together is a shared impatience with history and a corresponding desire to appropriate urban space. Illuminating the deeper meanings in these revived archaic forms, Staging the Absolute shows how pervasive the interest in disrupting history was in the Russian modern era.
