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Art for the workers explores the mythology and reality of post-revolutionary proletarian art in Russia as well as its expression in the festive decorations of Petrograd between 1917 and 1920. It covers this brief period chronologically, and so permits a close inspection of the development of artistic policies in Russia under the Provisional Government followed by the Bolsheviks. Specifically, this book focuses on the pre-and post-revolutionary debate about the nature of proletarian art and its role in the new Socialist society, particularly focusing on festive decorations, parades and mass performances as expressions of proletarian art and forms of propaganda.

The final decade of the old order in imperial Russia was a time of both crisis and possibility, an uncertain time that inspired an often desperate search for meaning. This book explores how journalists and other writers in St. Petersburg described and interpreted the troubled years between the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917.Mark Steinberg, distinguished historian of Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examines the work of writers of all kinds, from anonymous journalists to well-known public intellectuals, from secular liberals to religious conservatives. Though diverse in their perspectives, these urban writers were remarkably consistent in the worries they expressed. They grappled with the impact of technological and material progress on the one hand, and with an ever-deepening anxiety and pessimism on the other. Steinberg reveals a new, darker perspective on the history of St. Petersburg on the eve of revolution and presents a fresh view of Russia's experience of modernity.

Saving Stalin's Imperial City is the history of the successes and failures in historic preservation and of Leningraders' determination to honor the memory of the terrible siege the city had endured during World War II. The book stresses the counterintuitive nature of Stalinist policies, which allocated scarce wartime resources to save historic monuments of the tsarist and imperial past even as the very existence of the Soviet state was being threatened, and again after the war, when housing, hospitals, and schools needed to be rebuilt. Postwar Leningrad was at the forefront of a concerted restoration effort, fueled by commemorations that glorified the city's wartime experience, encouraged civic pride, and mobilized residents to rebuild their hometown. For Leningrad, the restoration of monuments and commemorations of the siege were intimately intertwined, served similar purposes, and were mutually reinforcing.

The siege of Leningrad constituted one of the most dramatic episodes of World War II, one that individuals and the state began to commemorate almost immediately. Official representations of 'heroic Leningrad' omitted and distorted a great deal. Nonetheless, survivors struggling to cope with painful memories often internalized, even if they did not completely accept, the state's myths, and they often found their own uses for the state's monuments. Tracing the overlap and interplay of individual memories and fifty years of Soviet mythmaking, this book contributes to understandings of both the power of Soviet identities and the delegitimizing potential of the Soviet Union's chief legitimizing myths. Because besieged Leningrad blurred the boundaries between the largely male battlefront and the predominantly female home front, it offers a unique vantage point for a study of the gendered dimensions of the war experience, urban space, individual memory, and public commemoration.

Featuring a number of distinguished essays by internationally known Russian cultural historians Boris Uspenskij and Victor Zhivov, this collection encompasses various ground-breaking works appearing in English for the first time. Focusing on several of the most interesting and problematic aspects of Russia’s cultural development, these essays examine the survival and reconceptualization of Russia’s past in later systems, and some of the key transformations of Russian cultural consciousness. This volume contains important examples of cultural semiotics and indispensable contributions to the history of Russian civilization.

This article includes translation of a “new” Vision of Daniel as it survived, albeit incomplete. It reflects a “meeting point” between three monotheistic religions in the ninth and tenth centuries CE. A comparative study of the work enables the reconstruction of its missing parts. The Vision may have been composed in the area where al-Muʿtaṣim battled Theophilos in the 830s CE, namely, northern Syria and southeastern Anatolia. An “updated” appendix was added around 1000 CE. Towards the end of the Vision, exact times are replaced with “flexible times,” a moderate expression of the cosmic changes found in similar eschatological works. The two anti-messiahs described, constructed as integrations of Jewish-Christian-Muslim traditions of the apocalyptical devils, reflect the shifting identities of messianic figures, who will reveal themselves once again (Parousia), albeit as demonic antichrists. One of the two is an inversion of the Christian image of Moses/Jesus, whereas the second is Armilus.

During the late Soviet period, the art collective known as the Mitki emerged in Leningrad. Producing satirical poetry and prose, pop music, cinema, and conceptual performance art, this group fashioned a playful, emphatically countercultural identity with affinities to European avant-garde and American hippie movements. More broadly, Alexandar Mihailovic shows, the Mitki pioneered a form of political protest art that has since become a centerpiece of activism in post-Soviet Russia, most visibly today in groups such as Pussy Riot. He draws on extensive interviews with members of the collective and illuminates their critique of the authoritarian state, militarism, and social strictures from the Brezhnev years to the present.

Including a foreword by Simon Callow, a dedicated admirer of the Maly, Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre provides both a valuable methodological model for actor training and a unique insight into the journeys taken from studio to stage. This is the first ever full-length study of internationally-acclaimed theatre company, the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg, and its director, Lev Dodin.Maria Shevtsova provides an illuminating insight into Dodin's directorial processes and the company's actor 4raining, devising and rehearsal methods, which she interweaves with detailed analysis of the Maly's main productions. Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance demonstrates how the impact of Dodin's work extends far beyond that of his native Russia, and gives the reader unparalleled access to the company's practice. List of Illustrations Foreward by Simon Callow Preface Part 1: The Maly in Context 1. From Leningrad to St Petersburg Dodin and the Maly: Journeys to the Future 2. The Working Process Improvising, Devising, Rehearsing Part 2. The Major Productions 3. Dodin's 'Theatre of Prose' 4. The Student Ensemble Gaudeamus and Claustrophobia: A Postmodernist Aesthetics 5. Chekhov in an Age of Uncertainty Part 3. Dodin at the Opera 6. Dodin Directs Opera 7. Anatomy of The Queen of Spades From Studio to Stage Bibliography Maria Shevtsova is Professor of Theatre Arts and Director of Postgraduate Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly .

This book is the first comprehensive treatment in any language of the most consequential work of art ever to be executed in Russia-the equestrian monument to Peter the Great, orThe Bronze Horseman,as it has come to be known since it appeared in Alexander Pushkin's poem bearing that title. The author deals with the cultural setting that prepared the ground for the monument and provides life stories of those who were involved in its creation: the sculptors Etienne-Maurice Falconet and Marie-Anne Collot, the engineer Marin Carburi, the diplomat Dmitry Golitsyn, and Catherine's \"commissar\" for culture, Ivan Betskoi. He also touches upon the extraordinary resonance of the monument in Russian culture, which, since the unveiling in 1782, has become the icon of St. Petersburg and has alimented the so-called \"St. Petersburg theme\" in Russian letters, familiar from the works of such writers as Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Bely.

There used to be a time when designers were trained in the history of composition.Now you just buy a fuckin' piece of software and now you've become a designer. \"Art Chantry... Is he a Luddite?\" asks a Rhode Island School of Design poster promoting a Chantry lecture. \"Or is he a graphic design hero?\" For decades this avatar of low-tech design has fought against the cheap and easy use of digital software. Chantry's homage to expired technology, and his inspired use of Xerox machines and X-Acto blade cuts of printed material, created a much-copied style during the grunge period and beyond. Chantry's designs were published in Some People Can't Surf: The Graphic Design of Art Chantry (Chronicle Books), exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian, and the Louvre. More recently, Chantry has drawn upon his extraordinary collection of twentieth-century graphic art to create compelling histories of the forgotten and unknown on essays he has posted on his Facebook page. These essays might lionize the unrecognized illustrators of screws, wrenches, and pipes in equipment catalogs. Other posts might reveal how some famous artists were improperly recognized. Art Chantry Speaks is the kind of opinionated art history you've always wanted to read but were never assigned.