European University Institute Library

Wonderlands of the avant-garde, technology and the arts in Russia of the 1920s, Julia Vaingurt

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 279-294) and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Wonderlands of the avant-garde

bibliography

806981295

Julia Vaingurt

Northwestern University Press studies in Russian literature and theory

technology and the arts in Russia of the 1920s

In postrevolutionary Russia, as the Soviet government was initiating a program of rapid industrialization, avant-garde artists declared their intent to serve the nascent state and to transform life in accordance with their aesthetic designs. In spite of their professed utilitarianism, however, most avant-gardists created works that can hardly be regarded as practical instruments of societal transformation. Exploring this paradox, Vaingurt claims that the artists' investment of technology with aesthetics prevented their creations from being fully conscripted into the arsenal of political hegemony. The purposes of avant-garde technologies, she contends, are contemplative rather than constructive. Looking at Meyerhold's theater, Tatlin's and Khlebnikov's architectural designs, Mayakovsky's writings, and other works from the period, Vaingurt offers an innovative reading of an exceptionally complex moment in the formation of Soviet culture.--, Provided by Publisher

Introduction: imaginative and instrumental technologies -- Part 1. Homo faber, homo ludens -- Poetry in motion: Aleksei Gastev and the aesthetic origins of soviet Biomechanics -- The biomechanics of infidelity: range of motion and limits of control in Meyerhold's theater -- Part 2. Alternative technologies -- Writing as bodily technology in Zamyatin's We, or a portrait of an avant-garde artist as a malfunctioning machine -- The incredible heights of organic architecture: tatlin, Khlebnikov, and the technological sublime -- Olesha's suicide machine -- Part 3. The homeland of technology -- Convention, play, and technology in Russian explorers' American discoveries -- Red Pinkertons: adventures in artificial reality -- Conclusion: poetics of the unconscriptable