Red Square, Black Square: Organon for Revolutionary ImaginationThis book builds a new vision of the development of Russian revolutionary culture, bringing together fiction, criticism, utopian projects, manifestos, performance and film theory, religious philosophy, and the imaginary space of communism centered around the Mummy of Lenin. Revolution and modernization are two main issues of the book. The author argues that in Modernism the work of art was conceived as a miniature of the world to come; thus, art was meant to make projects, not master-pieces. He analyzes the genre of the manifesto as a special rhetorical device of modernist discourse and shows how projects of biological and social engineering elaborate a vision of a future human type apt to exist under unprecedented conditions. Red Square, Black Square traces the process of totalitarian reduction of the modernist impulse into a rigid party doctrine. It follows the turbulent development of Russian Modernism through its categorical arrest under the official doctrine of "socialist realism." Moscow's Red Square is examined as a primal communist space that manifests the symbolism of power. Viewing communism as an aesthetically, not economically, motivated society, the book enacts "political aesthetics" as a discipline that provides the fundamental tool for an adequate and thorough understanding of communism. Todorov concludes by discussing the rise of nationalism in Eastern Europe as a post-communist condition, and the new mission of the intellectuals. |
Contents
Revolutionary Merger of the Political and the Aesthetic | 15 |
The Political Aesthetics of Modernization | 20 |
Revolutionary Devices | 29 |
Revolutionary Merger of Science and Art | 43 |
The Plot of Modernism and Its Centers | 48 |
On the Day After | 95 |
Party Science versus Political Art | 99 |
The Hologram World | 105 |
The Mummacrum of Power | 143 |
Permutatio Publica | 149 |
The Birth of the Mummy from the Spirit of Ideology | 150 |
Of the PostConspiratorial Society | 165 |
The Constitution of Social Integritas | 173 |
The Dangerous Intellect | 177 |
The End | 185 |
REFERENCES | 189 |
Other editions - View all
Red Square, Black Square: Organon for Revolutionary Imagination Vladislav Todorov Limited preview - 1995 |
Red Square, Black Square: Organon for Revolutionary Imagination Vladislav Todorov Limited preview - 1994 |
Red Square, Black Square: Organon for Revolutionary Imagination Vladislav Todorov No preview available - 1995 |
Common terms and phrases
Acmeism action actor Adam agit-prop appearance architecture artistic becomes bourgeois build cathedral collage communal body communist consciousness conspiracy conspiratorial construction constructivism corporality corpse cosmic creates creation Dada Dadaist device Dziga Dziga Vertov Earth eternal everyday Evreinov expressionism face false consciousness figure forms Foundation Pit Fourth Wall Fyodorov grand Gulag hologram human idea ideology integrity interest Kremlin labor launched Lenin machine magic Maiakovskii manifests mass Mausoleum means Melnikov merge metaphors Meyerhold modernism modernist Moscow mourning mummified Mummy museum objects organism original outer space Party power physique Platonov poetic political aesthetics political art precisely principle proletarian proletarian body Proletcult prostheses psyche radical Real socialism reality Red Square Reich represents Revolution revolutionary ruins Russian scientific sexual socialist realism society Soviet stage Stalin strategic structure sublime symbolic theater things tion transformation turned ultimate underground utopia vision Voloshinov words