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Red Migrations

Red Migrations

Transnational Mobility and Leftist Culture After 1917

Edited by Philip Tuxbury-Gleissner and Bradley A. Gorski

Published by: University of Toronto Press

Imprint: University of Toronto Press

504 Pages, 159.00 × 235.00 × 37.00 mm

Hardcover
9781487543884
Published: September 2024

£53.00

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Description
Contents
Authors

Together with a new political, social, and cultural order, the Bolshevik Revolution also brought about a spatial revolution. Changed patterns, motivations, and impacts of migration collided with new cultural forms and aesthetic mandates. Red Migrations highlights the various multidirectional and multilateral transnational movements of leftist thinkers, artists, and writers.

The book draws on avant-garde poets such as David Burliuk, Marxist theoreticians such as János Mácza, and "fellow travellers" such as Langston Hughes, revealing how leftists of all stripes were inspired and at times impelled by the Soviet Revolution to cross borders. It explores how the resulting circulation of ideas, aesthetic forms, and individuals not only contributed enormously to the ferment of creative activity in the early Soviet years, but also deeply informed international leftist aesthetics and political practice throughout the twentieth century.

The robust and diverse transnational networks created by these circulations are at the centre of this volume. With original archival research and insightful analyses, Red Migrations sheds light on the ideals, aspirations, and disappointments of leftist transnationalism from the 1920s through the 1960s and the aesthetic forms they engendered.

Introduction: From Internationalism to Transnationalism
Philip Gleissner and Bradley A. Gorski

Part I: Forms

1. "How They Do It in America": Cultural Arbitrage in Soviet Russia
Serguei Oushakine

2. Transnational Theory of the Avant-Garde: János Mácza, Artistic Praxis, and the Marxist Method
Irina Denischenko

3. Staging Revolution: Stalinist Drambalet in the German Democratic Republic
Elizabeth H. Stern

4. Hegelienkov: Eval'd Ilienkov, Western Marxism, and Philosophical Politics after Stalin
Trevor Wilson

Part II: Geographies

5. Guides to Berlin: Exiles, Émigrés, and the Left
Roman Utkin

6. "Syphilis, Dirt, and the Frontiers of Revolution": Langston Hughes and Arthur Koestler at the Borders of Disgust
Bradley A. Gorski

7. The Intellectual Migrations of the British Communist Ralph Fox during the 1920s and 1930s
Katerina Clark

Part III: Identities

8. Revolutionary Violence with Chinese Characteristics: Chinese Migrants in Early Soviet Literature
Edward Tyerman

9. The Feeling and Fragility of Modernity: Red Mobility against the Grand Tour in Nikolai Aseev's The Unmade Beauty (1928)
Michael Kunichika

10. Blackness in the Red Land: African Americans and Racial Identity in the "Colourless" Soviet Union
Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon

Part IV: Communities

11. The "Father of Russian Futurism" in America: David Burliuk and the Russian Voice
Anna Arustamova

12. Exilic Experiments in Education: The Multiple Lives and Journeys of László Radványi, pseud. Johann-Lorenz Schmidt
Helen Fehervary

13. Haunting Encounters: Reimagining Hermina Dumont Huiswoud's Trip to the Soviet Union, 1930–3
Tatsiana Shchurko

14. Desiring the USSR: Writers from Two Germanys in the Soviet Contact Zone
Philip Gleissner

Philip Gleissner is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at the Ohio State University.

Bradley A. Gorski is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages at Georgetown University.