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The Geography of Revolutionary Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2020

Mayhill C. Fowler
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Abstract

This article argues that a focus on Ukraine challenges the general understanding of culture in the revolutionary period, which either focuses on artists working in Moscow making Soviet art, or on non-Russian (Ukrainian, Jewish or Polish) artists in the regions making “national” art. Neither paradigm captures the radical shift in infrastructure during the imperial collapse and civil war. Placing the regions at the center of analysis highlights how Kyiv was an important cultural center during the period for later artistic developments in Europe and in the USSR. It shows that revolutionary culture is fundamentally wartime culture. Finally, the article argues that peripheral visions are central to a full geography of culture in order to trace how cultural infrastructures collapse and are re-constituted.

Type
Critical Discussion Forum: Ukraine in Revolution
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 78 , Issue 4 , Winter 2019 , pp. 957 - 964
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2020

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References

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