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In the 1920s, with the end of the revolution, the Soviet government began investing resources and energy into creating a new type of book for the first generation of young Soviet readers. In a sense, these early books for children were the ABCs of Soviet modernity; creatively illustrated and intricately designed, they were manuals and primers that helped the young reader enter the field of politics through literature. Children’s books provided the basic vocabulary and grammar for understanding new, post-revolutionary realities, but they also taught young readers how to perceive modern events and communist practices. Relying on a process of dual-media rendering, illustrated books presented propaganda as a simple, repeatable narrative or verse, while also casting it in easily recognizable graphic images. A vehicle of ideology, object of affection, and product of labour all in one, the illustrated book for the young Soviet reader emerged as an important cultural phenomenon. Communist in its content, it was often avant-gardist in its form. Spotlighting three thematic threads – communist goals, pedagogy, and propaganda – The Pedagogy of Images traces the formation of a mass-modern readership through the creation of the communist-inflected visual and narrative conventions that these early readers were meant to appropriate.

The Russian avant-garde was a composite of antagonistic groups who wished to overthrow the basic aesthetics of classical realism. Modernism was the totality of these numerous aesthetic theories, which achieved a measure of coherence immediately after the First World War. This collection of essays by leading scholars examines the major figures, movements, and manifestos of the period. Scholarly attention is given to literature, visual arts, cinema, and theatre in an attempt to capture the complex nature of the modernist movement in Russia. This book would be especially relevant for university courses on the Russian twentieth century as well as for those looking for a comprehensive approach to the various movements and artistic expressions that constitute the Russian avant-garde.

During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called \"the magic pilgrimage\" to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued \"ethnic avant-garde.\" These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an \"Afro-Cuban\" voice; Langston Hughes's translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway's first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.

An Ecology of the Russian Avant-Garde Picturebook takes a new approach to interpreting 1920s and 1930s picturebooks by prominent Russian writers, artists, and intellectuals by examining them within the ecological environment that, first, made them possible and, then, led to their demise. It argues that naturalistic models of the complex interactions of dynamic systems offer effective tools for understanding the fraught interrelations of art and censorship in the early Soviet period. Through illustrative case studies, it mounts a close analysis of word and image and their synergistic interplay in avant-garde picturebooks, while also recontextualizing them within the ecology of their original environment where extraordinary countervailing forces played out a drama of which these books survive as telling artifacts. Ultimately, it argues that the Russian avant-garde picturebook offers a uniquely illustrative example of literary ecology that sheds light on issues of creativity and censorship, politics and art, more broadly as well.

Winner of the American Comparative Literature Association's Rene Wellek Prize (2004) As one of the founding poets and editors of the Language School of poetry and one of its central theorists, Barrett Watten has consistently challenged the boundaries of literature and art. In The Constructivist Moment, he offers a series of theoretically informed and textually sensitive readings that advance a revisionist account of the avant-garde through the methodologies of cultural studies. His major topics include American modernist and postmodern poetics, Soviet constructivist and post-Soviet literature and art, Fordism and Detroit techno—each proposed as exemplary of the social construction of aesthetic and cultural forms. His book is a full-scale attempt to place the linguistic turn of critical theory and the self-reflexive foregrounding of language by the avant-garde since the Russian Formalists in relation to the cultural politics of postcolonial studies, feminism, and race theory. As such, it will provide a crucial revisionist perspective within modernist and avant-garde studies.

This collection of essays deals broadly with the visual and cultural manifestation of utopian aspirations in Russia of the 1920s and 1930s, while examining the before- and after-life of such ideas both geographically and chronologically.

A comprehensive and innovative analysis of Soviet literary and cinematic children's canon. Marking the centennial of Soviet cultural production for children, it reviews the rich and dramatic history of Soviet children's books, films, and animation and explores their importance for contemporary Russian audiences.

Making Modernism Soviet provides a new understanding of the ideological engagement of Russian modern artists such as Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, and Vera Ermolaeva with the political and social agenda of the Bolsheviks in the chaotic years immediately following the Russian Revolution. Focusing on the relationship between power brokers and cultural institutions under conditions of state patronage, Pamela Kachurin lays to rest the myth of the imposition of control from above upon a victimized artistic community. Drawing on extensive archival research, she shows that Russian modernists used their positions within the expanding Soviet arts bureaucracy to build up networks of like-minded colleagues. Their commitment to one another and to the task of creating a socially transformative visual language for the new Soviet context allowed them to produce some of their most famous works of art. But it also contributed to the \"Sovietization\" of the art world that eventually sealed their fate.

The first biography of Nikolay Punin, this book offers a comprehensive analysis of his life in the context of Russian political, social and cultural history in the first half of the 20th century.

Focusing on the gestures of giving, touching, showing and handcrafting, this study examines key scenes of tactile interaction between subject and artifact. The readings of this book call for a revision of an optically obscured aesthetics and poetics to include haptic experience as an often overlooked but pivotal part of the making as well as the perception of literature and the arts.