"First published in hardcover by The Vendome Press in 2008"--Copyright page.

"At the turn of the 20th century, against the background of the pomp and circumstance of the Imperial court and the rumblings of social unrest and political upheaval, Moscow and St. Petersburg experienced a sudden, brilliant flowering of the visual, literary, and performing arts. Known in Russia as the Silver Age, this cultural renaissance is captured in all of its dazzling originality in this sumptuously illustrated volume." "Much of this new efflorescence was indebted to the Symbolist movement, which fell on fertile soil in the boundless expanse of Mother Russia. The Russian Symbolists lived and created on the edge, which often earned them the sobriquet of Decadent or Degenerate. Yet, as impresario Sergei Diaghilev declared, theirs was not a moral or artistic decline, but a voyage of inner discovery and a refurbishing of a national culture." "Advancing in roughly chronological sequence, Moscow St. Petersburg 1900-1920 develops themes and propositions that relate closely - but not exclusively - to key social and political developments in Russian history, which were both refracted and affected by painting, poetry, music, and dance. With some 650 illustrations, the book carries a rich repertoire of artistic images and vintage documentary photographs, many of which have not been previously published."--BOOK JACKET.

"This book focuses on the visual and material culture of St Petersburg and Moscow at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Advancing in roughly chronological sequence, Moscow and St Petersburg in Russia's Silver Age highlights the essential social and political developments of this turbulent era, which painting, poetry, music and dance both refracted and affected. A dazzling array of artists, writers, composers, actors, singers, dancers and designers are presented in context. The book carries a rich repertoire of artistic images and vintage documentary photographs, many of which have not been published before. With a clear narrative and comprehensive bibliography, this volume will appeal both to the specialist and to the general student of Russian history and culture."--BOOK JACKET.

In the bookshops of present-day St. Petersburg, guidebooks abound. Both modern descriptions of Russia’s old imperial capital and lavish new editions of pre-Revolutionary texts sell well, primarily attracting an audience of local residents. Why do Russians read one- and two-hundred-year-old guidebooks to a city they already know well? In How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself, Emily Johnson traces the Russian fascination with local guides to the idea of kraevedenie. Kraevedenie (local studies) is a disciplinary tradition that in Russia dates back to the early twentieth century. Practitioners of kraevedenie investigate local areas, study the ways human society and the environment affect each other, and decipher the semiotics of space. They deconstruct urban myths, analyze the conventions governing the depiction of specific regions and towns in works of art and literature, and dissect both outsider and insider perceptions of local population groups. Practitioners of kraevedenie helped develop and popularize the Russian guidebook as a literary form. Johnson traces the history of kraevedenie, showing how St. Petersburg–based scholars and institutions have played a central role in the evolution of the discipline. Distinguished from obvious Western equivalents such as cultural geography and the German Heimatkunde by both its dramatic history and unique social significance, kraevedenie has, for close to a hundred years, served as a key forum for expressing concepts of regional and national identity within Russian culture. How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself is published in collaboration with the Harriman Institute at Columbia University as part of its Studies of the Harriman Institute series.

Catherine Evtuhov resurrects the brilliant and contradictory currents of turn-of-the-century Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg through an intellectual biography of Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), one of the central figures of the Silver Age. The son of a provincial priest, Bulgakov served first as one of Russia's most original and influential interpreters of Marx, and then went on to become the century's most important theologian of the Orthodox faith. As Evtuhov recounts the story of Bulgakov's spiritual evolution, she traces the impact of seemingly opposed philosophical and religious world views on one another and on the course of political events. In the first comprehensive analysis of Bulgakov's most important religious-philosophical work, Philosophy of Economy, Evtuhov identifies a "perceptual revolution" in Russian thinking about economy, a significant contribution to European modernist thought which both shaped and grew out of contemporary debates over land reforms. She reconstructs Bulgakov's vision of an Orthodox, constitutional Russia, shows how he tried to put it into practice in the wake of the February Revolution, and demonstrates its importance for a large and influential portion of Russian society.

Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936), Russia's first openly gay writer, stood at the epicenter of the turbulent cultural and social life of Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad for over three decades. A poet of the caliber of Aleksandr Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelshtam, and Marina Tsvetaeva (and acknowledged as such by them and other contemporaries), Kuzmin was also a prose writer, playwright, critic, translator, and composer who was associated with every aspect of modernism's history in Russia, from Symbolism to the Leningrad avant-gardes of the 1920s. Only now is Kuzmin beginning to emerge from the "official obscurity" imposed by the Soviet regime to assume his place as one of Russia's greatest poets and one of this century's most characteristic and colorful creative figures. This biography, the first in any language to be based on full and uncensored access to the writer's private papers, including his notorious Diary, places Kuzmin in the context of his society and times and contributes to our discovery and appreciation of a fascinating period and of Russia's long suppressed gay history.

In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists. The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina’s timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.

A comprehensive history of Russian theatre, written by an international team of experts.

Focusing primarily on the close study of literary works presented in the broad cultural and historical context, Jacob's Ladder discusses the reflection of kabbalistic allegory in Russian literature and provides a detailed analysis of the evolution of the perception of Kabbalah in Russian consciousness. Aptekman investigates the questions of when, how and why Kabbalah has been used in Russian literary texts from Pre-Romanticism to Modernism and what particular role it played in the larger context of the Russian literary tradition. The correct understanding of this liaison helps the reader to clarify many enigmatic images in Russian literary works of the last two centuries and to understand the roots of a particular cultural falsification that played an important role in the anti-Semitic mythology of the twentieth century.