Presents modernism in Russia through the lens of its engagement with politics, science, religion, and other social practices. In the early twentieth century, when many Russian social institutions looked to the past, modernist arts powerfully amplified a gamut of new ideas about individual and collective transformation.

Russian Archaism considers the aesthetic quest of Russian modernism in relation to the nation-building ideas that spread in the late imperial period. Irina Shevelenko argues that the cultural milieu in Russia, where the modernist movement began as an extension of Western trends at the end of the nineteenth century, soon became captivated by nationalist indoctrination. Members of artistic groups, critics, and theorists advanced new interpretations of the goals of aesthetic experimentation that would allow them to embed the nation-building agenda within the aesthetic one. Shevelenko's book focuses on the period from the formation of the World of Art group (1898) through the Great War and encompasses visual arts, literature, music, and performance. As Shevelenko shows, it was the rejection of the Russian westernized tradition, informed by the revival of populist sensibilities across the educated class, that played a formative role in the development of Russian modernist agendas, particularly after the 1905 revolution. Russian Archaism reveals the modernist artistic enterprise as a crucial source of insight into Russia's political and cultural transformation in the early twentieth century and beyond.

This book explores the unique way in which Russian culture constructs the notion of everyday life, or byt, and offers the first unified reading of Silver-age narrative which it repositions at the centre of Russian modernism. Drawing on semiotics and theology, Stephen C. Hutchings argues that byt emerged from a dialogue between two traditions, one reflected in western representational aesthetics for which daily existence figures as neutral and normative, the other encapsulated in the Orthodox emphasis on iconic embodiment. Hutchings identifies early 'Decadent' formulations of byt as a milestone after which writers from Chekhov to Rozanov sought to affirm the iconic potential hidden in Russian realism's critique of representationalism. Provocative, yet careful, textual analyses reveal a consistent urge to redefine art's function as one not of representing life, but of transfiguring the everyday.

In 1911 Vasily Kandinsky published the first edition of ‘On the Spiritual in Art’, a landmark modernist treatise in which he sought to reframe the meaning of art and the true role of the artist. For many artists of late Imperial Russia – a culture deeply influenced by the regime’s adoption of Byzantine Orthodoxy centuries before – questions of religion and spirituality were of paramount importance. As artists and the wider art community experimented with new ideas and interpretations at the dawn of the twentieth century, their relationship with ‘the spiritual’ – broadly defined – was inextricably linked to their roles as pioneers of modernism. This diverse collection of essays introduces new and stimulating approaches to the ongoing debate as to how Russian artistic modernism engaged with questions of spirituality in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Ten chapters from emerging and established voices offer new perspectives on Kandinsky and other familiar names, such as Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Larionov, and Natalia Goncharova, and introduce less well-known figures, such as the Georgian artists Ucha Japaridze and Lado Gudiashvili, and the craftswoman and art promoter Aleksandra Pogosskaia. Prefaced by a lively and informative introduction by Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow that sets these perspectives in their historical and critical context, Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives enriches our understanding of the modernist period and breaks new ground in its re-examination of the role of religion and spirituality in the visual arts in late Imperial Russia. Of interest to historians and enthusiasts of Russian art, culture, and religion, and those of international modernism and the avant-garde, it offers innovative readings of a history only partially explored, revealing uncharted corners and challenging long-held assumptions.

What is modernism in Southeast Asia? What is modern art, as embodied in the paintings of Southeast Asia? These questions and more are answered in Reframing Modernism: Painting from Southeast Asia, Europe and Beyond, published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name. Featuring 217 works, in full colour, by 51 Southeast Asian and European artists, from the Centre Pompidou and National Gallery Singapore, as well as other Southeast Asian collections in the region and beyond, this catalogue tells the compelling story of modernism as it developed across continents, and reveals artists' powerful, and sometimes surprising, responses to modernity.

Aiming to open an overdue debate about the academic fields of Russian and transnational modernist studies, this book is intended for an audience of scholars in comparative literary and cultural studies, specialists in Russian and transnational modernism, and researchers engaged with European cultural historiography.

Russian Modernism began with the triumph of the symbolist style and survived until the Stalinist terror of the late 1930s. It was an age bristling with visions of glorious or terrifying futures, with manifestos for new artistic movements, and with furious feuds between them. Utopias brings together Mikhail Bakhtin's celebrated analysis of "carnival culture"; reflections by painter and stage designer Leon Bakst and film director Sergei Einstein; and major texts by Isaac Babel and Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Nabokov and Boris Pasternak; as well as many works by less well-known but equally talented figures. This richly illustrated collection offers an astonishing look at one of history's most stimulating artistic eras.