Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture

Fascinated by the myth of the Russian avant-garde and scornful of official art, the West has been selective in its engagement with Russian visual culture. Yet how do contemporary Russian scholars and critics themselves approach the history of visual culture in the former Soviet Union? Taking its title from a Russian word that can refer to the texture of life, painting, or writing, Tekstura assembles 13 key essays in art history and cultural theory by Russian-language writers. The essays erase boundaries between high and low, official and dissident, avant-garde and socialist realism. Everything visual is deemed worthy of analysis, whether painting or propaganda banners, architecture or candy wrappers, mass celebrations or urban refuse. The editors have selected works of the past 20 years by philosophers, literary critics, film scholars, and art historians as well as influential earlier essays by Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and Eisenstein. Compiled for general readers and specialists alike, Tekstura is a resource for anyone interested in Russian and Soviet cultural history or in new theoretical approaches to the visual.