Research Catalog

Laboratory of dreams : the Russian avant-garde and cultural experiment

Title: Laboratory of dreams : the Russian avant-garde and cultural experiment / edited by John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich.
Publication: Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, [1996], ©1996.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	DK246 .L33 1996	Off-site

Additional Authors

Description

xvii, 359 pages : illustrations; 25 cm

Summary

Drawing upon social history, material culture, and the sciences, this is the first interdisciplinary study of the Russian avant-garde, a brilliant constellation of personalities and ideas that changed the course of Russian culture just before and after the First World War.
Though different in creative systems and applications, the artists and writers of the Russian avant-garde shared certain fundamental attitudes toward the purpose of culture, believing, for example, that art had the power to change "life," even as defined by science.
The essays discuss the many refractions of that common denominator, treating the avant-garde not as a purely artistic and literary movement, but as a multifarious phenomenon that included cultural experimentation normally considered beyond the confines of the avant-garde.
In one way or another, all the contributors demonstrate that the artists and writers of the Russian avant-garde attempted to make the word flesh by restructuring human life, for the avant-garde not only generated new configurations of geometries and dissonant phonemes, but also heralded the transformations of the world by seeking to overcome physical, even biological barriers.

Subjects

Bibliography (note)

Contents

Introduction / John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich -- The Transfiguration of Cannibals: Fedorov and the Avant-Garde / Irene Masing-Delic -- Body Beautiful: The Artistic Search for the Perfect Physique / John E. Bowlt -- Remaking the Bed: Utopia in Daily Life / Olga Matich -- Media Fantasies and Penetrating Vision: Some Links Between X Rays, the Microscope, and Film / Yuri Tsivian -- Tsiolkovsky as a Moment in the Prehistory of the Avant-Garde / Michael Holquist -- Toward an Exact Aesthetics: Pavel Florensky and the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences / Nicoletta Misler -- Development or Rebuilding: Views of Academician T. D. Lysenko in the Context of the Late Avant-Garde / Boris Gasparov -- The Sacred Profaned: Image and Word in the Paintings of Mikhail Larionov / John E. Malmstad -- The Profane Made Sacred: The Theology of the Oberiu Declaration / Sarah Pratt -- The Birth of Socialist Realism from the Spirit of the Russian Avant-Garde / Boris Groys --
Dmitrii Furmanov's Chapaev and the Aesthetics of the Russian Avant-Garde / Ronald Vroon -- Platonov, Socialist Realism, and the Legacy of the Avant-Garde / Thomas Seifrid -- Eisenstein's Poetics: Dialogical or Totalitarian? / Alexander Zholkovsky -- The Avant-Garde and the Retrospectivists as Players in the Evolution of Stalinist Culture / Katerina Clark.

ISBN

0804725535 (cloth : alk. paper)

LCCN

95036491

OCLC

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries