Art in Revolution : Russian avant-garde between Aspirations and Reality

The book explores the often hidden processes by which key figures of the Russian artistic avant-garde crossed paths with the Soviet revolutionary movement in the early decades of the 20th century. Artists such as Kazimir S. Malevich and Vladimir Y. Tatlin drew on elements of ancient folk and religious traditions, rooted in the materiality of collective life, and found unexpected affinities with the socialist doctrines that were gaining ground. Like other avant-garde figures, they embraced the revolutionary perspective while also attending to the “modernist” renewal taking hold in Western countries. The result was a distinctive combination of artistic and revolutionary avant-gardes, in which the former contributed decisively to shaping the discourse of the Soviet and Leninist Revolution, inserting itself – not without contradictions, but fully – into the novyi byt (new life). The political and artistic outcome was the proposal of a “solidarity realism”, which, however, was undermined by the advent of Stalin, who paved the way for a very different model of socialist realism that imposed itself on politics, the economy, cultural policy, and, inevitably, artistic creation.