Utopias: Russian Modernist Texts 1905-1940

Russian Modernism began with the triumph of the symbolist style and survived until the Stalinist terror of the late 1930s. It was an age bristling with visions of glorious or terrifying futures, with manifestos for new artistic movements, and with furious feuds between them. Utopias brings together Mikhail Bakhtin's celebrated analysis of "carnival culture"; reflections by painter and stage designer Leon Bakst and film director Sergei Einstein; and major texts by Isaac Babel and Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Nabokov and Boris Pasternak; as well as many works by less well-known but equally talented figures. This richly illustrated collection offers an astonishing look at one of history's most stimulating artistic eras."Modernism everywhere entailed a drastic, dangerous breach with the past; in Russia it gained an extra impetus from an entire society's efforts to modernize itself. Utopias tells the whole whirligig story. . . . This is the Dr. Zhivago for highbrows!" --Peter Conrad, author of Modern Times, Modern Places: How Life and Art Were Transformed in a Century of Revolution, Innovation, and Radical Change