How the Aesthetic Revolution Was Turned Upside Down, or, Avant-Garde Conservatism in Today’s Russia

The methods of explicit, “sharp” montage in cinema and other visual arts which emerged and developed during the early twentieth century are usually associated with left-wing artistic practices, and even today they carry an aura of aesthetic innovation. However, as the lecture will argue, the same devices could serve very different, politically and aesthetically conservative, purposes. By examining the history of the transformations of montage in Russian culture during the past century, we can better understand the roots of the popularity of neo-conservative tastes in today’s Russia. The lecture will focus on the paradoxical influence which the avant-garde film director Serguei Eisenstein exerted upon the conservative, anti-modernist writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.


Ilya Kukulin is an associate professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and is currently a visiting professor at Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia. His book, Machines of the Noisy Time: How the Soviet Montage Became an Aesthetic Method of the Unofficial Culture (Moscow, 2015) was awarded the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize and listed by the oppositional Novaya Gaseta as one of the best non-fiction publications of 2015. He
​has ​also edited six volumes of articles on a variety subjects ranging from the history of education in the 20th-century Eastern Europe to the cultural practices of the internal colonization in Russia. His articles on Russian literature, social thought and political discourses in Russian social media ​have been published in Russia, Germany, Norway, China, Lithuania, Armenia, and the USA.