Mary O'Connor and Katherine Tweedie tell the story of a dedicated artist in difficult circumstances whose working life spanned a Victorian upbringing in Hamilton, Ontario, and the witnessing of the first Soviet Five-Year Plan. The authors use feminist and historical questions as well as close readings of the photographs to relate Watkins' work to questions of gender, modernity, and visual culture. Watkins' modernism, which involved experimentation and a radical focus on form, transgressed boundaries of conventional, high-art subject matter. Her focus was daily life and her photographs, whether an exploration of the objects in her New York kitchen or the public and industrial spaces of Glasgow, Paris, Cologne, Moscow, and Leningrad in the 1930s, strike a balance between abstraction and an evocation of the everyday, offering a unique gendered perspective on modernism and modernity.

This is the first biography in any language of 'Comrade Prince' D. S. Mirsky (1890-1939), who uniquely participated in three distinctive episodes of modern European culture. In late imperial St Petersburg he was a poet, a student of Oriental languages and ancient history, and also a Guardsofficer. After fighting in World War I and the Russian Civil War, Mirsky emigrated, taught at London University, and became a literary critic and historian, writing prolifically in English, and also in Russian for the Paris-centred emigration, especially as a leading member of the Eurasian movement.His closest literary relationships were with Marina Tsvetaeva and Aleksei Remizov, and later with Maksim Gorky. In 1926-7 he published A History of Russian Literature, written in English, which remains the standard introduction to the subject. While in London he lived in Bloomsbury and knew theWoolfs; he also knew T. S. Eliot, and was the first Russian critic to write about him. Mirsky became a Communist in 1931 and returned to Stalin's Moscow the following year, becoming a prominent Soviet critic, and in particular championing Boris Pasternak. In 1937 he was arrested, and died in theGulag. This biography draws on much unpublished material, including Mirsky's NKVD files.

Sergei Tretyakov is one of those artists and intellectuals from the first half of the twentieth century whose name is known, but whose achievements are barely recognized. He seems curiously elusive. Who exactly was he? What did he do? A victim of Stalin’s Great Terror, declared an ‘enemy of the people’, his works were ‘disappeared’ and his name forbidden to be mentioned. But he was at the very heart of avant-garde modernism. He collaborated with Sergei Eisenstein both in the theatre and on films, and was behind Eisenstein’s formative theory of ‘the montage of attractions’. He was one of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s most intimate associates. He was a crucial influence in the formulation of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s biomechanics and of Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, and he was a potent force behind Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. His influence grew from the astonishing range of his intellectual and artistic work. He was a distinguished poet and playwright, and a formidable cultural theorist. He played the piano with skill, precision and feeling, he could draw cartoons good enough to be reproduced in newspapers, he became one of Russia’s foremost radio broadcasters, and he was an outstanding photographer. At the same time, he was a warm and affectionate husband and father, a bold, argumentative and charismatic friend, and a shrewd observer of revolutionary Russia’s hopes and struggles. This book uncovers the multifarious facets of this fascinating artist and thinker, sets his ideas in the context of his time and for the first time reveals the significance of his diverse achievements.