Penguin Modern Classics: Utopias - Millenial Anthologies

Russian Modernism began with the triumph of the symbolist style and survived until the Stalinist terror of the late 1930s. This was an age bristling with visions of glorious or terrifying futures, with manifestos for new artistic movements and furious feuds between them. This richly illustrated anthology brings together Bakhtin's celebrated analysis of 'carnival culture'; reflections by painter and stage designer Leon Bakst and film director Sergei Eisenstein; and major texts by Babel and Bulgakov, Mayakovsky and the Mandelstam, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, Nabokov and Pasternak, as well as many works by less well-known, but equally talented figures. Supporting or subverting of Soviet regime, baldly realistic or boldly experimental, they capture the essence of an astonishingly fertile and stimulating literary era.