A critical reexamination of Russian modernist cultural
historiography.
Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic
Languages and Literatures by the Modern Language Association
The writing and teaching of Russian literary and cultural history have
changed little since the 1980s. In Search of Russian Modernism
challenges the basic premises of Russian modernist studies, removing the
aura of certainty surrounding the analytical tools at our disposal and
suggesting audacious alternatives to the conventional ways of thinking
and speaking about Russian and transnational modernism.
Drawing on methodological breakthroughs in Anglo-American new modernist
studies, Leonid Livak explores Russian and transnational modernism as a
story of a self-identified and self-conscious interpretive community
that bestows a range of meanings on human experience. Livak's approach
opens modernist studies to integrative and interdisciplinary analysis,
including the extension of scholarly inquiry beyond traditional artistic
media in order to account for modernism's socioeconomic and
institutional history.
Writing with a student audience in mind, Livak presents Russian
modernism as a minority culture coexisting with other cultural
formations while addressing thorny issues that regularly come up when
discussing modernist artifacts. Aiming to open an overdue debate about
the academic fields of Russian and transnational modernist studies, this
book is also intended for an audience of scholars in comparative
literary and cultural studies, specialists in Russian and transnational
modernism, and researchers engaged with European cultural
historiography.
