Russian Revolution (1917)
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…
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Nijinska, Bronislava (1891–1972)
The premiere female ballet choreographer of the first half of the twentieth century, Bronislava Nijinska experienced the transformative power of the Russian Revolution and discovered…
Pasternak, Boris (1890–1960)
Major Russian poet and writer, Pasternak, was recognized as a leading, original poetic talent with the collection My Sister Life (written 1917, published 1922). My…
Agitprop Theatre
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…
Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanas’evich (Булгаков, Михаил) (1891–1940)
Mikhail Bulgakov was a Russian prose writer and playwright. In the last 25 years of the Soviet Union’s existence Bulgakov was one of its most…
Lenin, Vladimir (1870–1924)
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…
Russian Modernism (1890–1934)
Russian modernism arose as a rejection of positivism and the realism of the major nineteenth-century Russian novelists such as Lev Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Ivan…
Di Yunge
Di yunge is a group of American Symbolist Yiddish writers and critics that achieved prominence during the first two decades of the twentieth century and…
Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
The first feature film of legendary Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, Strike, is an anatomy of the germination of collective action, its surveillance within modern networks…
Modernism in Europe
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…
Trotsky, Leon (1879–1940)
Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, is one of the most controversial figures in twentieth-century history. Along with Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), he played a decisive…
Anarchism
Anarchism is a term derived from the Greek anarkhia, meaning “contrary to authority” or ”without a ruler.“ Anarchism narrowly refers to a theory of society…
Rozanov, Vasily (1856–1919)
Leading writer, publicist, literary critic, and philosopher in late 19th- and early 20th-century Russia, Rozanov was born in Vetluga, Russia, in 1856, and remained in…
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic (1918/1919–1933) is a term used to describe the German Reich (Deutsches Reich) after the end of World War I and after the…
The Cantos
The Cantos is a series of 120 long poems by the American poet, essayist, and cultural critic Ezra Pound. Pound began work on them as…
Luxemburg, Rosa (1871–1919)
Also known as ‘Red Rosa’, Rosa Luxemburg was a writer, philosopher, feminist, and labour activist who fuelled the socialist movement in Weimar Germany. For modernists…
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:…
Ridge, Lola (1873–1941)
A proletarian modernist, the poet Lola Ridge is best known for her work published between 1918 and 1922, which coincided with her editorship of Broom…
Mayakovsky, Vladimir (1893–1930)
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…
Nabokov, Vladimir [ВЛАДИМИР НАБОКОВ ] (1899–1977)
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…
Politics and Cinema
The relationship between politics and the cinema is probably one of the most vexatious questions to have occupied the academic discipline of film studies, and…
Khlebnikov, Velimir (1885–1922)
One of the founders of Russian Futurism, Khlebnikov can be counted as one of the movement’s most prominent and seminal representatives. Widely acclaimed for his…
Fokine, Michel (1880–1942)
Michel Fokine’s seventeen works for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1909–29) revitalized ballet in the early twentieth century. In Fokine’s most successful works, the body became…
Balanchine, George (1904–1983)
George Balanchine (Georgii Melitonovich Balanchivadze), arguably the greatest ballet choreographer of the twentieth century, was at once both modernist and traditionalist. Unlike many radical innovators,…
Werfel, Franz (1890–1945) [REVISED AND EXPANDED]
Franz Viktor Werfel was a Jewish-born Austrian novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, and translator best known in the Anglophone world for his works of historical fiction,…