The Russian Avant-Garde

The revolutionary avant-garde of Russia in the Twenties was among the most fertile episodes of all Modernism. But the theoretical ideas underlying their challenging imagery and language have hitherto been only glimpsed. Since Stalin stamped out such enquiry in the early Thirties, key personalities were driven into obscurity. Soviet researchers permitted to touch this material could publish only circumscribed vignettes which neither mediated the cultural divide nor placed the ideas in their larger intellectual and political contexts. Here for the first time is a study that exploits the freedoms of the new situation in Russia to explore the intellectual challenges of this extraordinary material and to present its ideas with the same objectivity as we apply to Western work. At one level the book is a readable and colourful introduction to the whole period and its major artistic and architectural personalities, many of whom emerge as individuals with coherent views and distinctive careers for the first time. At another level, it is a unique source book of original documentary texts which not only bring the period to life in entirely new detail, but offer a launchpad for teaching and further research. By cutting through the period in different ways, successive chapters build a multi-dimensional narrative that starts with foundations of avant-garde theoretical debate in the nineteenth century.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.