Founded by Vladimir Lenin in 1919 to instigate a world revolution, the Comintern sought to advance not only the proletarian struggle but also a wide variety of radical causes, including fighting against imperialism and racism in settings as varied as Ireland, India, the United States, and China. Notoriously, and from the organization's outset, these causes grew ever more subservient to Soviet state interest and Stalinist centralization.

Comintern Aesthetics shows how the cultural and political networks emerging from the Comintern have persisted, even after the Comintern's demise in 1943. Tracing these networks through a multiplicity of artistic forms geared towards advancing a common, liberated humanity, this volume captures both the failure and the enduring allure of a Soviet-centred world revolution.

The sixteen chapters in this edited volume examine cultural and revolutionary circuits that once connected Moscow to China, Southeast Asia, India, the Near East, Eastern Europe, Germany, Spain, and the Americas. The Soviet Union of the interwar years provided a template for the convergence of party politics and cultural history, but the volume traces how this template was adapted and reworked around the world. By emphasizing the shared Soviet routes of these far-flung circuits, Comintern Aesthetics recaptures a long-lost moment in which cultures could not only transform perception but also highlight alternatives to capitalism - namely, an anti-colonial world imaginary foregrounding race, class, and gender equality.

About the Author
Amelia M. Glaser is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Steven S. Lee is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

"This is the best collection of essays this reviewer has read in recent years. It has been doomed to success by its very conception-an account of the body of cultural production, and especially literature, inspired and in some cases enabled, by the international communist movement."

-- Rossen Djagalov * The Russian Review, Vol. 80, No. 3 *

"I would highly recommend this volume not only to specialists in aesthetics and poetics but also to a wider audience interested in deepening its knowledge about international communism in the twentieth century. In broader Comintern literature, I would argue that this volume is positioned well within the connections between the Soviet central machine and the geographically widespread writers, artists, communists, and activists who plugged into Comintern aesthetics."

-- Vsevolod Kritskiy, University of Amsterdam * H-Russia *


Awards
Winner of 2021 AATSEEL Best Edited Multi-Author Volume awarded by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages 2022 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9781487504656
Author Amelia Glaser
Format Hardback
Page Count 592
Imprint University of Toronto Press
Publisher University of Toronto Press
Weight(grams) 920g
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 160mm * 43mm