Prigov and the Gesamtkunstwerk

This article discusses the relation of Prigov's cultural project to a concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art. It is not only notable that Prigov was simultaneously a poet, a painter, a sculptor, a performance artist, and a theoretician (and it is hard to say which of these roles he identified most strongly with), but that he also experimented with all possible materials, forms, genres, and types of art. Also remarkable is that openness and intersections are manifest in all his work: text in painting, a visual quality and theatricality in text, text as a score for performance (of the alphabet), philosophizing as an artistic text (premonitions), and so forth. The author traces the transformation of Wagner's concept from its reception in the Silver Age, to its appropriation by Socialist Realism, and finally to Prigov's ultimate vision of it. The article analyzes two main directions of transformations of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Prigov's oeuvre. Firstly, although Gesamtkunstwerk as an idea of shaped formlessness became irrelevant with the loss of traditional conventions and the crisis of modernist strategies of subversion, its practices, since it was itself the product of a modernist breakthrough, proved themselves to be extraordinarily fruitful. One can easily find those very same structural elements in Prigov's texts and visual works, where functionally they are completely reinvented and form part of a completely different-"de-totalizing"-aesthetic strategy. Secondly, the transformations of Wagnerian mythology became the only possible realization of the totalitarian romantic utopia in contemporary mass society. Prigov took up the idea of the total work of art after the collapse of the utopia, completing the ruins and reconstructing them into an almost "intact" state. But the main thing is that he constructed his total work of art, not from different arts, but from a single subject-Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov. He did not create a synthesis of the arts, but rather a personality synthesis, by carrying out an experiment in the creation of a total work of art after the experience of modernism. Accordingly, we should regard Prigov's texts not only as an new ideological construct that both defamiliarizes and makes explicit (thereby exposing the totalitarian aspirations of language and ideology), but also as the product of a unique experiment on himself, laying the headstone for not only the totalitarian utopia but also for its creator, the artist-visionary

Reading Stalinism: Stalinist Culture as a Field of Research

The article analyses Stalinism as a research field, which has been rapidly changing since the early 1990s, when the study of Stalinism left the sphere of traditional Sovietology and gradually became one of the dominant trends in the history of the twentieth century. Among the main factors that influenced the formation of this scientific field are the change of generations of researchers, interdisciplinarity and methodological shifts, democratization, the opening of archives, as well as changes in the academic eco - nomy. However, in general, the analysis of Western and Russian historiography reveals numerous gaps in the study of Stalinism and the need for new methodological and institutional changes

Judgement Day of Russian Literature: Post-Classical Novel, The Canon and Transgression

В статье рассматривается эволюция русского постклассического романа в его взаимосвязи с классической традицией.The article examines the evolution of the Russian post-classical novel through its relationship with the classical tradition

The school tale in children’s literature of socialist realism

Socialist Realist conventions of the Soviet school tale is analyse

The Soviet spectacle the all-union agricultural exhibition

The Soviet spectacle the all-union agricultural exhibitio

Late stalinist cinema and the cold war: An equation without unknowns

The article explores Soviet films of the cold-war period by Aleksandrov, Romm, Kalatozov, and Abram Room, as well as the unfinished Farewell America by Aleksandr Dovzhenko. These films focus on the juxtaposition between the USSR and the enemy (Fascist Germany or capitalist America); they reflect the destabilized world system in which the Soviet Union - victorious, but isolated after the war - asserts its moral superiority. The films restore an ideological equilibrium upset by the war, and thus create the illusion of stability and, for the Soviet Union, superiority. They cushion the viewer in a safe scheme of moral and political values, reassuring him of the world order. This accounts for the popularity of the films in their day

“And, As I Fell Headlong, I Awakened…” About the History of Soviet Literature

Analysis of new approaches to history of Soviet literature during perestroik

Hegemony of Brotherhood: The Birth of Soviet Multinational Literature, 1922-1932

The formation of Soviet multinational literature is usually attributed to 1934, the activities of Gor?kii and the created Union of Soviet Writers. In fact, institutionally, the project of Soviet multinational literature began to be implemented within the framework of the VAPP (All-Union showcase of the RAPP, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) immediately after the creation of the USSR in 1922. Since in 1932 the RAPP was dissolved and condemned, it became politically disadvantageous to associate such an ideologically important project with it, and the entire dramatic history of the creation of Soviet multinational literature of the previous decade was erased and almost never mentioned (or mentioned in a highly distorted form). Based entirely on new archival sources, this article traces and documents for the first time this formative period in the institutionalization of Soviet multinational literature

From the compiler

The relevance of laughter as coercion and even as a mechanism of intimidation and control is discussed in the context of Soviet humor

Literary criticism and the transformations of the literary field during the cultural revolution, 1928-1932

history of soviet literary criticism 1928-3