Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Art
Episode: Iva Glisic, "The Futurist Files: Avant-Garde, Politics, and Ideology in Russia, 1905–1930" (NIU Press, 2018)
Description: Futurism was Russia's first avant-garde movement. Gatecrashing the Russian public sphere in the early twentieth century, the movement called for the destruction of everything old, so that the past could not hinder the creation of a new, modern society. Over the next two decades, the protagonists of Russian Futurism pursued their goal of modernizing human experience through radical art. The success of this mission has long been the subject of scholarly debate. Critics have often characterized Russian Futurism as an expression of utopian daydreaming by young artists who were unrealistic in their visions of Soviet society and naïve i...