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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of new approaches to history of Soviet literature during perestroik

Utopias of return: Notes on (post-)Soviet culture and its frustrated (post-)modernisation

This article discusses the role of representative strategies in twentieth-century Russian culture. Just as Russia interacted with Europe in the Marquis de Custine's time via discourse and representation, in the twentieth century Russia re-entered European consciousness by simulating 'socialism'. In the post-Soviet era, the nation aspired to be admitted to the 'European house' by simulating a 'market economy', 'democracy', and 'postmodernism'. But in reality Russia remains the same country as before, torn between the reality of its own helplessness and poverty, and the messianic myth of its own greatness. Post-Soviet culture is a product of Stalinist culture. 'Russian postmodernism' was created less by artists, writers, poets, and film makers, than by theorists and critics. At the beginning of the 1990s, a need to describe contemporary Russian culture emerged. In this way, 'Russian postmodernism' arose from the desire to 'sell' projects in the West-from the simple obligation to describe socialist experience in concrete, transferable terms that Westerners could grasp. The nostalgia experienced by the post-Soviet era creates its own simulated postmodernism, in which the matrices of the construction and functioning of culture cease to be connected with specifically Russian (Soviet) history, and instead reproduce Western models almost exactly. We are facing yet another attempt at radical cultural modernization. If the first attempt (revolutionary culture) was the most original and fruitful, and the second (Stalinist culture, Socialist Realism) was less productive but still original, then the third, post-Soviet, attempt (rich in individuality, but lacking in original ideas or style) is for the moment the least productive and original. If we exclude sots-art (conceptualism) from 'Russian postmodernism', there would be nothing left. Clearly, an original cultural model in post-Soviet Russia will not take shape until original strategies for processing the country's cultural past are developed. In their turn, these strategies can only result from a radical transformation of post-Soviet identity into a new, genuinely Russian one. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V