The Russian Avant Garde Book 1910 1934

Edited by Deborah Wye and Margit Rowell. Essays by Jared Ash, Gerald Janecek, Nina Gurianova, Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye.

The focus of this study is the book format as produced by Russian avant-garde artists and poets from 1910 to 1934. This period saw a remarkable proliferation of books in which artists were involved, and such books played a fundamental role in the aesthetic thinking of the day. Radical new forms appearing in both painting and poetry in the teens, offered by a close-knit community of artists and poets, provided the impetus.

Edited by Deborah Wye and Margit Rowell. Essays by Jared Ash, Gerald Janecek, Nina Gurianova, Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye.

Volume covers the Collection of Prints and Illustrated Books, not the collection of artists' books.

A collection of extraordinary essays by one of the seminal Russian poets of the twentieth century Gennady Aygi’s longtime translator and friend Peter France has compiled this moving collection of tributes dedicated to some of the writers and artists who sustained him while living in the Moscow “underground.” Written in a quiet intensely expressive poetic style, Aygi’s inventive essays blend autobiography with literary criticism, social commentary, nature writing, and enlightening homage. He addresses such literary masters as Pasternak, Kafka, Mayakovsky, Celan, and Tomas Tranströmer, along with other writers from the Russian avant-garde and his native Chuvashia. Related poems by Aygi are also threaded between the essays. Reminiscent of Mandelstam’s elliptical travel musings and Kafka’s intensely spiritual jottings in his notebooks, Time of Gratitude glows with the love and humanity of a sacred vocation. “These leaves of paper," Aygi says, 'are swept up by the whirlwind of festivity; everything whirls—from Earth to Heaven—and perhaps the Universe too begins to swirl. Everything flows together in the rainbow colors and lights of the infinite world of Poetry.'

A major resource, collecting essays, articles, manifestos, and works of art by Russian artists and critics in the early twentieth century, available again at the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution