Containing analyses of everything from prisoner poetry to album covers, Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag moves beyond the simplistic good/evil paradigm that often accompanies Gulag scholarship. While acknowledging the normative power of Stalinism—an ethos so hegemonic it wanted to harness the very mechanisms of inspiration—the volume also recognizes the various loopholes offered by artistic expression. Perhaps the most infamous project of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, the...
This collective volume aims to highlight the philosophical and literary idea of apocalypse within key examples in the Slavic world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From Russian realism to avant-garde painting, from the classic fiction of the nineteenth century to twentieth-century philosophy, not omitting theatre, cinema or music, the concepts of “end of history” and “end of present time” are specifically examined as conditions for a redemptive image of the world. To understand...