Library Catalog

Devastation and Laughter : Satire, Power, and Culture in the Early Soviet State (1920s-1930s) /

Gérin, Annie

Devastation and Laughter : Satire, Power, and Culture in the Early Soviet State (1920s-1930s) / Annie Gérin. - 1 online resource (288 p.)

restricted access http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

In Devastation and Laughter, Annie Gérin explores the use of satire in the visual arts, the circus, theatre, and cinema under Lenin and Stalin. Gérin traces the rise and decline of the genre and argues that the use of satire in official Soviet art and propaganda was neither marginal nor un-theorized. The author sheds light on the theoretical texts written in the 1920s and 1930s by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment, and the impact his writings had on satirists. While the Avant-Garde and Socialist Realism were necessarily forward-looking and utopian, satire afforded artists the means to examine critically past and present subjects, themes, and practice. Devastation and Laughter is the first work to bring Soviet theoretical writings on the use of satire to the attention of scholars outside of Russia. By introducing important bodies of work that have largely been overlooked in the fields of art history, film and theatre history, Annie Gérin provides a nuanced and alternative reading of early Soviet art.


Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.


In English.

9781487502430 9781487515324

10.3138/9781487515324 doi


Art and state--Soviet Union.
Arts, Soviet.
Laughter--Soviet Union.
Satire in art.
Satire, Soviet.
ART / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945).

Anatoly Lunacharsky. Satire. Soviet. art. cinema. circus. theatre.

NX556.A1 / G47 2018eb

700.947