With a brief nod to the broadly international and interdisciplinary nature of the avant-garde as a unifying factor, the editor Slav N. Gratchev devotes the volume’s introduction to a summary of the individual chapters without proposing an overarching structure to pull them together. This serves to emphasize the diffuse nature of the avant-garde as a tenuous assemblage of topics with the editor as more bricoleur than conductor. The twelve essays in the volume thus work as individual case histories with a tendency to examine somewhat narrow swaths of the literary, cultural, and philosophical landscape that comprised the Russian and East-European avant-garde. This degree of focus frequently makes this book a valuable guide to specific corners and niches of the avant-garde that contribute to the movement’s distinctiveness. The insights offered by a more microscopic approach to the avant-garde are evident in a number of the volume’s chapters.

The Russian Review

This wide-ranging collection cuts across disciplinary boundaries, enriching and refining our understanding of the Russian avant-garde; there is so much that is new here and so much that readers with interest in art history, film, literature, architecture, and dance are bound to enjoy.

Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London