Abstract

Ilya Kukulin. Privatization of a riot: “Second life” of the early Soviet montage. This paper deals with montage in the broad sense of the term: it is discussed not as a principle of film editing, but as an aesthetic method based on the contrasting combination of elements; in the case of literary narrative, montage can be defined as a contrasting parataxis. Being understood in that sense, montage became an international “grand style” of the post-WWI epoch. In the Soviet Union this new method had many ideological connotations. It represented history as creative and cruel violence. Otherwise, art montage wasa method of designing the utopian vision. The following development of montage in Russian culture could be defined as a change of its semantic. It was expelledfrom the Socialist Realism mainstream , but survived in unofficial art of the 1940s and became postutopian. During the “Thaw” period montage methods could indicate the connection of an author with the Soviet or Western European avant-garde of the 1920s. The reconsideration of those methods followed two different ways: imitation of the “resurrection of revolutionary impulses” or deconstruction of Soviet historical and social imagination – also with the tools of montage. This very intensive dialogue with the aesthetic tradition of the 1920s came to an end at the beginning of the 1970s. The authors of uncensored art and literature in that period polemicized not with the 1920s, but with the 1960s. The “living” translation of the early Soviet montage aesthetics has been settled