Literature and Art of the Russian Avant-Garde

Examines the Russian avant-garde between 1912, the year of the first Russian futurist manifesto, and early 1930s when Social Realism became this only sanctioned style of art. This, arguably the most vibrant period in Russian art, permeated with unprecedented sense of creative and political urgency, coincided with the WWI and the Russian Revolution, which provide historical contexts for the analyzed works. Also stresses aesthetic and historic interconnections between the Russian and western avant-gardes. Includes the works of poetry, prose, literary manifestos, book design, painting, and film by such artists as Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, Mandelshtam, Meyerhold, Malevich, Rodchenko, Eisenstein, among others.