Degree Date
2024
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History of Art
Abstract
This dissertation examines the ruptured temporality of “wartime” in works by artists, poets, and filmmakers belonging to the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes between 1914 and 1928. Wartime, this study argues, shaped the aesthetics and temporality of canonical works from cubo-futurist illustrated books and collage painting to agitprop theatre and groundbreaking silent film produced in an era of industrialized warfare, revolutionary upheaval, and civil unrest. I reveal the ways in which manifest notions of time were challenged and dismantled in a myriad of artistic forms, styles, and concepts responding to the First World War.
Over five chapters, this dissertation examines the ways in which artists working in a variety of media meditated on past wars and imagined futural wars between 1914 and 1928. I explore the unsettling experience of anticipating and protesting the War by civilians away from the frontlines in illustrated books including War by Olga Rozanova and Aleksei Kruchenykh, The Mystical Images of War by Natalia Goncharova, and Universal War also by Kruchenykh published between 1914 and 1916. During the height of hostilities, I analyze the intersection between war, disability, and crip time in portraiture of conscription and soldierhood in the collage painting Reservist of the First Division by Kazimir Malevich. The dissertation turns to an exploration of the recurrent motifs of war and violence in the 1913 futurist opera Victory over the Sun and its agitprop restagings in 1920 and 1923 through the Civil War and communist contexts. I conclude with an examination of commemorative films reflecting on the traumatic memory of the intertwined events of war and revolution in The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty by Esfir Shub, The End of St. Petersburg by Vsevolod Pudovkin, and October by Sergei Eisenstein produced between 1927 and 1928. Through the concept of wartime, this study examines the temporal slippage between wartime and peacetime, combatant and civilian, and war and revolution to illustrate the profound ways that war shaped the aesthetics and temporality of the avant-garde.
Citation
Yezernitskaya, Mechella, "Wartime Art and Temporality in the Russian and Soviet Avant-Gardes, 1914–1928," Ph.D. diss., Bryn Mawr College, 2024.