This study examines spatial dimensions of state violence against the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the 1930s, and the creation of a place of surveillance, the famous House of Writers (Budynok Slovo), an apartment building that was conceived by an association of writers “Slovo” in Kharkiv This building fashioned an important identity for Ukrainian intellectuals, which was altered under state pressure and the fear of being exterminated Their creative art was gradually transformed into the art of living and surviving under the terror, a feature of a regimented society The study explores the writers’ behavior during arrests and interrogation, and examines the Soviet secret police’s tactics employed in interrogation rooms 

The narrative considers the space of politics that brought the perpetrators of terror and their victims closer to each other, eventually forcing them to share the same place Within this space and place they became interchangeable and interchanged, and ultimately were physically eliminated Importantly, the research illuminates the multiethnic composition of the building’s residents: among them were cultural figures of Ukrainian, Russian and Jewish origins Their individual histories and contributions to Ukrainian culture demonstrate the vector of Stalin’s terror which targeted not Ukrainian ethnicity as such but instead was directed against the development of Ukrainian national identity and Ukrainian statehood that were perceived as a challenge to the center’s control and as harbingers of separatism 

The study also reveals that the state launched the course of counter-Ukrainization in 1926 and disintegrated the Ukrainian intellectual community through mass repressive operations which the secret police began to apply from 1929 The study also demonstrates that, together with people, the state purposefully exterminated national cultural artifacts—journals, books, art and sculpture, burying human ideas which have never been and will never be consummated The purpose was to explain how the elimination of most prominent Ukrainian intellectuals was organized, rationalized and politicized During the period of one decade, the terror tore a hole in the fabric of Ukrainian culture that may never be mended

Spatial dimensions of Soviet repressions in the 1930s : the House of Writers (Kharkiv, Ukraine)

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The personality cult of Stalin in Soviet posters, 1929–1953: Archetypes, inventions and fabrications

My dissertation investigates, at its broadest level, the visualization of the future city in Moscow and New York at the end of the 1920s. In particular I examine two imaginative designs executed in the form of "paper architecture." One proposition was delivered by Georgii Tikhonovich Krutikov, a Soviet student of architecture, who in 1928 presented a diploma project called Gorod budushchego (City of the Future), and the other model was suggested by Hugh Ferriss, an architectural Tenderer, in his book entitled The Metropolis of Tomorrow, published in 1929.1 want to discover the circumstances that prompted these two architects to suggest intriguing concepts of the ideal city, in which both authors employed similar metaphors, associated with height and a skyward trend applied to urban space. Evidently their projects announced novel ways to rethink the form of a modern city, but why is the improbable concept of " f l y i ng " such an important part of Krutikov 's gorod, and why does Ferriss's metropolis evoke mountainous formations? What were the conditions at play at the end of the 1920s that prompted both architects to propose such eccentric visions? Since Krutikov's professional debut coincided with the Communist Party's adoption of Stalin's First Five-Year-Plan (October 1928 December 1932), and Ferriss's publication concurred with the Wal l Street Crash inl929, my interest leads me to reevaluate these two projects according to issues and ideas residing outside of aesthetics

Urbanotopia and the frontier : reaching heights before the crash in Moscow and New York at the end of the 1920s

Literary Praxis Beyond the Melodramas of Commitment: Edward Upward, Soviet Aesthetics, and Leftist Self-Fashioning

In 1911 Vasily Kandinsky published the first edition of ‘On the Spiritual in Art’, a landmark modernist treatise in which he sought to reframe the meaning of art and the true role of the artist. For many artists of late Imperial Russia – a culture deeply influenced by the regime’s adoption of Byzantine Orthodoxy centuries before – questions of religion and spirituality were of paramount importance. As artists and the wider art community experimented with new ideas and interpretations at the dawn of the twentieth century, their relationship with ‘the spiritual’ – broadly defined – was inextricably linked to their roles as pioneers of modernism. This diverse collection of essays introduces new and stimulating approaches to the ongoing debate as to how Russian artistic modernism engaged with questions of spirituality in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Ten chapters from emerging and established voices offer new perspectives on Kandinsky and other familiar names, such as Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Larionov, and Natalia Goncharova, and introduce less well-known figures, such as the Georgian artists Ucha Japaridze and Lado Gudiashvili, and the craftswoman and art promoter Aleksandra Pogosskaia. Prefaced by a lively and informative introduction by Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow that sets these perspectives in their historical and critical context, Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives enriches our understanding of the modernist period and breaks new ground in its re-examination of the role of religion and spirituality in the visual arts in late Imperial Russia. Of interest to historians and enthusiasts of Russian art, culture, and religion, and those of international modernism and the avant-garde, it offers innovative readings of a history only partially explored, revealing uncharted corners and challenging long-held assumptions.

Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives

In this text, Irina Gutkin brings together work on the subject of Soviet aesthetic ideology to argue that socialist realism encompassed a philosophical world view that marked thinking in the Soviet Union on all levels, political, social, and linguistic. Using a wealth of diverse cultural material, the book traces the emergence of central operative in socialist realist theory and praxis from Symbolism to pre- and post- revolutionary Futurism, through the 1920s and 1930s. Rich in both cultural and philosophical analysis, this book should appeal to Russian scholars and historians, as well as the general reader.

Irina Gutkin

Papers

The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic: 1890-1934