Transcript Seminar Presentation

5. UTOPIAN FICTION
AVANT-GARDE POETRY & PROSE
TODAY’S SEMINAR
• Presentations
• Lecture discussion
• Brief introduction to Red Star (1908)
• Group work on Red Star
ALEKSANDR BOGDANOV (1873-1928)
Born Tula, 1873
Medical degree, 1899
Underground agent for Social Democrats
Becomes a Bolshevik in 1904
Associate of Lenin but falls out with him
Publishes utopian science fiction (Red Star, 1908; Engineer
Menni, 1912)
Part of Proletkult movement after 1917
Dies after blood transfusion goes wrong, 1928
1905 REVOLUTION
INDUSTRIALIZATION
URBAN LIFE
V. Makovskii, ‘On the Boulevard’ (1886-87)
SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY
UTOPIAN SPECULATION
E. Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1891)
A. Bebel, The Woman and Socialism (1879)
L. Braun, The Women’s Question (1891)
UTOPIAS
• What is a utopia?
• How does a utopia differ from a political
manifesto?
UTOPIA V MANIFESTO
“Programs tend to be tabular, static, flat, dry and singularly
unemotional; if emotion is in evidence, it is usually in the
form of hatred or indignation. Programs and plans are of
necessity too brief and schematic to offer lyrical
descriptions of a coming life. Utopian social daydreaming is
something else. It is visionary in the extreme. The dreamer
may be a peasant, an emperor, or a revolutionary socialist—
the mechanism is the same... Sleeping dreams, reveries,
daydreams, fantasies, and imagination all detach the
dreamer from the immediate environment.”
Richard Stites, Utopian Dreams: Utopian Vision and
Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989), pp.13-14.
GROUP EXERCISE
Choose one of these five themes:
• Labour and Economy
• Health and Education
• Arts and Culture
• Gender and Equality
• History and Revolution
Answer the following questions:
1.
How does Bogdanov describe the functioning of these domains in
Martian society? (Or, in the case of history and revolution, how are
the differences between Martian and Earth societies explained?)
2.
To what extent does this utopian writing recall Bolshevik
revolutionary experiments?
UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA
NEXT WEEK
Reading:
John Bowlt, ed. and transl., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and
Criticism, 1902-1934 (London, 1988), pp. 54-60, 151-158, 164-166, 208214, 221-222, 244-249.
Christina Kiaer, “Into Production!”: The Socialist Objects of Russian
Constructivism, eipcp.net (March 2009).
• How is artistic revolution connected to social/political revolution
and the renewal of the everyday in these movements?
• Do these artistic movements suggest a tension between a social
revolution and a revolution of the self?
• Are abstract art, expressed in cubo-futurism and suprematism, and
constructivism opposed?
• Is suprematism reactionary or revolutionary?