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Rediscovering a lost luminary of modernism and the Russian avant-garde
 
This kaleidoscopic biography offers readers a compelling microhistory of a revolutionary moment in art and politics through its portrait of an enigmatic but influential figure: Ivan Aksyonov authored the first book-length study about Pablo Picasso, translated Elizabethan drama, and was a literary adviser to Vsevolod Meyerhold, as well as a teacher of Sergei Eisenstein in Meyerhold’s institute and an important critic, before dying in 1935. Lars Kleberg traces Aksyonov’s influences, interlocutors, and creative output in multiple genres and media to bring a complicated and fascinating character back to life. Kleberg invites us to reconsider the avant-garde and to understand the political and artistic ferment of the revolutionary era and its aftermath in new, deeper ways.

Modern Russia has been shaped by Peter the Great's sudden attempt to transform it into a European country. Since shapeshifting and identity are so closely linked in Russian history, it is hardly surprising that metamorphosis is a prevalent - albeit hitherto neglected - theme in Russian literature. Metamorphoses in Russian Modernism provides the first detailed account of metamorphosis as a Russian theme, structuring principle, and source of artistic identity. Barta examines how the magical transformations depicted in the ancient classics and in the oral epic heritage resonate in Russian literature and film at the fin de siècle and the early decades of the twentieth century - a period of dynamic change in Russian culture. Two hundred years after Peter's forceful westernization and facing its second crucial transformation in 1917, Russia witnessed the decay of classic realism and positivism and the rise of irrational philosophies, psychoanalysis, artistic experimentation, Marxism, as well as the birth of the new genre of film. This in-depth volume examines metamorphosis in the works of prominent representatives of the divided Russian intelligentsia: the Symbolists; the most famous émigré writer, Nabokov; Olesha, the 'fellow traveller' attempting to find his place in the Soviet state; the enthusiastic poet of the Bolshevik movement, Maiakovskii; and finally, Russia's greatest film director, Sergei Eisenstein. The volume directs attention to the fact that Russia itself is a metamorph. The shapeshifter always retains features of previous identities and is sometimes capable of returning into previous forms; whether today's Russia will want to, or be able to do so, remains to be seen. It is futile to attempt to try to understand this civilisation - let alone predict its future - without considering the intellectual, social and emotional reasons why it is not at rest with itself. It is to this end that this volume hopes to make a contribution.

How modernist interartistic experimentation and the proliferation of new media technologies inspired fresh insights into poetry

Isobel Palmer spotlights Russian modernist poets’ and formalist theorists’ conscious engagement with formal convention, showing how their efforts were tied up with broader attempts in the early Soviet era to understand and articulate the nature of poetry and its most characteristic devices. Returning to critical debates around poetic encounters with three key aesthetic categories—rhythm, image, and voice—Palmer unpacks the period’s deeper interest in the material bases of poetic speech itself. Through fresh, incisive readings of canonical poets and theorists, from Andrei Bely and Vladimir Mayakovsky to Yury Tynianov and Viktor Shklovsky, Revolutions in Verse: The Medium of Russian Modernism explores the proliferation of interartistic experiments and the emergence of new media technologies that made poetry visible as a medium in its own right.

Investigating late imperial Russian and early Soviet modernism’s reinvention of the actor

In this wide-ranging study, Alisa Ballard Lin argues that Russian theatrical theory and practice contributed to a broad pre- and postrevolutionary discourse about the mind, profoundly reshaping concepts of consciousness, perception, identity, and the constitution of the subject. Theatrical Consciousness: The Actor’s Mind in Russian Modernism examines efforts in Russian theater—from around the turn of the century through the mid-1930s—to stimulate, train, imagine, and ultimately understand the actor’s, as well as the spectator’s, mind. Discussing key figures of the period, including Nikolai Evreinov, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Alexander Tairov, Lin identifies an underappreciated dimension of humanism within Russian modernism: a humanism that resisted the pressures of an increasingly technologized, industrialized, and politicized modernity that challenged the place of the human within it.