Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism

This book analyzes the modernist aesthetic utopia, advancing two arguments concerning the historical evolution of the Russian literary and cultural tradition: that modernism, ostensibly reacting against positivism and realism, assimilated some of the fundamental principles of its archenemy; and that there is an essential continuity between turn-of-the-century modernist aesthetics and Soviet culture of the 1920’s and 1930’s.