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"It is commonly argued that Joseph Stalin's rise to power ended a vibrant period in Soviet avant-garde art and literature. Formal experimentalism was replaced by a call for clarity, accessibility, and ideological conformity. However, while Stalin demanded that artistic works focus on socialist content, he did allow for national forms that would allow artists and writers to draw upon the regional traditions of the new Soviet republics in Central Asia. In Reorientalism: From Avant-Garde to National Form, Nariman Skakov, argues that Stalin's formula of "national in form, socialist in content," provided a context in which formal "strangeness" could reemerge as the product of sanctioned practice. Through the domain of the "national," the potency of modernist writing and visual production remained viable in the 1930s in the Soviet Union. In examining the works of Viktor Shklovsky, Aleksandar Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei Eisenstein, Skavov demonstrates how the exotic yet again becomes an opportunity for formal innovation in the Soviet Union. This allowed the artists and writers in this book to employ a variety of strategies to cope with overwhelming political demands. Altogether, these strategies of resistance, compliance, and imaginative interpretations demonstrate that Soviet modernism never settled into a fixed aesthetic terrain. Instead, it drew on Central Asia to maintain a transformative and dynamic practice."-- Provided by publisher.
About the author
Nariman Skakov is a visiting research fellow at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo. He has taught at Stanford University and Harvard University.
