Mary A. Nicholas

We Were Born to Make Fairytales Come True: Reinterpreting Political Texts in Unofficial Soviet Art

Abstract Written texts became an especially significant element of unofficial pictorial art during the late Soviet period. Beginning in the early 1970s and continuing through the end of the Soviet Union, such painted words played a transformative role on the canvases of unofficial Russian artists. The resulting contrast between textual and visual art helped make conceptualism—the most important Russian art movement of the end of the twentieth century—an unexpectedly influential branch of unofficial Soviet art. In the case of Russian conceptualism, such artistic texts were often borrowed from the world of politics in a subtle re-evaluation of both the pictorial art that they supplanted and the political system in which they arose. This article investigates the various ways in which painted, printed, and handwritten political texts appear on the canvases of unofficial artists in the late Soviet period, 1972–1992. Art played a significant role as an ideological weapon in both the Soviet Union and the West. A better sense of the manner in which this war of words was waged in unofficial art expands our understanding of the end of the Soviet system.

In Search of the Collective Author: Fact and Fiction from the Soviet 1930s

Collectively authored projects were a staple of creative life in the 1930s, part of the literary and historical landscape in this decade of broad strokes and communal gestures. Jointly authored projects captured the imagination of writers and historians in the United States, England, and the European continent, but nowhere was the concept more compelling than in Stalinist Russia. The creation of collective works in the Soviet Union was a complex process, full of such conflicting and contradictory developments that scholars still debate the most fundamental questions surrounding the topic. The end of the Soviet era has made it easier to draw conclusions about this chapter of cultural history, of course, but issues of chronology, authorial motivation, the exact role of coercion in Stalinist literary and historical production, and even questions of terminology remain unresolved. Much of this ongoing debate revolves around the transitional period from the end of the 1920s to the middle of the 1930s, overlapping the first and second Five-Year Plans. This phase in the history of Russian book culture deserves much closer critical attention for what it can tell us about the origins of Stalinism and the role of Soviet writers in creating it.1 The years of prewar Stalinism witnessed an explosion of large-scale government-sponsored construction projects, including canals, railroads, public transit systems, even entire cities. From the beginning, those plans went hand-in-hand with schemes of collective authorship. Early Soviet construction projects were rushed, wasteful, and often coercive endeavors, but the regime nevertheless took pride in its efforts to industrialize peasant Russia, and numerous cultural campaigns were organized on the literary front to publicize this push toward modernization. Writers were newly conceptual-