“You lose, you lose, you lose, you lose, and then you win.”

Rosa Luxemburg

The worldwide revolutionary movement inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 encompassed a powerful cultural component: hundreds of thousands of literary, visual, and performing artists – writers, painters, filmmakers, photographers, composers, and others – passionately devoted their work to the monumental task of a radical reconstitution of the world. As a prominent Yugoslav author, Miroslav Krleža, was to write in 1924: “Lenin's name in the year 1917 signified a lighthouse beacon above the shipwreck of international civilization.”