Communism, Socialism, Marxism, Bolshevism
Communism is first and foremost the reality of long-dismantled or nearly defunct regimes in China, the (former) Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Cuba and North Korea:…
Communism is first and foremost the reality of long-dismantled or nearly defunct regimes in China, the (former) Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Cuba and North Korea:…
Prior to World War II, Constructivism attracted little interest from British artists apart from the few involved with Circle in 1937. Circle consisted of a…
Futurism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century as a movement that explicitly conceptualized the process of literary and artistic experimentation as part of…
We are living in a very singular moment of history. It is a moment of crisis, in the literal sense of that word. In every…
The Russian artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin was one of the central figures in the Russian avant-garde in the years surrounding the Bolshevik Revolution of…
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Zenkevich was a Russian poet and author, one of the founders of Tsekh poetov [The Guild of Poets] and the Acmeist movement—a representative…
Sergei Alexandrovich Esenin was one of Russia’s major lyrical poets. He described himself as “the last poet of the village.” Raised in a peasant family,…
Vladimir Nabokov was one of the leading novelists of the twentieth century. He was born in St Petersburg, Russia in 1899, but spent most of…
Born in Portland, Oregon in 1887, John Reed was a radical American journalist known for his depictions of early twentieth-century labour politics and political revolutions.…
Now widely used as a catchall term to describe politically combative or oppositional art, “agitprop” originated from the early Soviet conjunction of propaganda (raising awareness…
Joseph Stalin (Iusif Vassarionovich Dzhugashvili) was born in Gori, Russian Empire, which is part of present-day Georgia. He adopted the name ‘Stalin’ from the Russian…
Boris Barnet (b. June 18, 1902, Moscow, Russia; d. January 8, 1965, Riga, Latvia) was a Russian actor, director, and professional boxer. He made his…
Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius (Hippius) was a poet, prose writer, playwright, literary critic, religious thinker, and editor. Together with her husband Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941) and fellow…
One of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets, Aleksander Aleksandrovich Blok (1880–1921) was a representative of the ‘second wave’ of Russian Symbolists. Two books of poetry, Verses…
Loenid Maksimovich Leonov was a Russian prose writer and playwright. Born in Moscow, Leonov volunteered as a soldier and journalist in the Red Army during…
Ernst Bloch was a German Marxist philosopher. Fleeing the Nazis in 1934, he lived in exile in Switzerland, France, Czechoslovakia, and the US. In 1949…
Born Nikolai Vasil’evich Korneichukov, Chukovsky was a renowned writer, critic, and translator. He was born in St. Petersburg but moved to Odessa at the age…
The Russian Revolution occurred in two stages toward the close of World War I. It led to the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty and the…
Georges Sorel was a French social thinker and political theorist. An engineer of modest bourgeois extraction, he was a state employee for twenty-five years. He…
Vladimir Lenin (born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) was the most prominent figure in the translation of Marxist political economy and theories of proletarian revolution into successful…
Lev Kuleshov was a Soviet director and theorist who initiated the montage movement of the 1920s. He proclaimed editing to be the primary authorial act…
Vladimir Mayakovsky (МАЯКОВСКИЙ, ВЛАДИМИР) was a leading Russian poet of the twentieth century and representative of Russian Futurism, a modernist trend that emerged as an…
Mavo was a coterie of vanguard artists, designers, and poets centered on Tokyo between July 1923 and late 1925. It sought to politicize art amid…
György Lukács was a Hungarian philosopher and literary critic. Born into a wealthy Jewish family, he spent his youth in Berlin and Vienna studying German…