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Victory over the Sun: The Revolution before the Revolution

Class starts Jan 5 10:45am-12:00pm

Tuition: $300 | YIVO members: $225**

Registration is no longer available.

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Rosamund Bartlett

This course will examine Victory over the Sun, the scandalous Russian Futurist "anti-opera" premiered in St. Petersburg in the pivotal year of 1913. With its "trans-sense" libretto and abstract designs by Malevich, this experimental work was as radical as the Ballets Russes production of The Rite of Spring staged just months earlier. The course will consider the artistic, literary, musical and political context of this seminal modernist event, and explore its role in bringing the Russian arts to the forefront of the European avant-garde on the eve of the First World War. The course will conclude with a study of two important productions conceived in 1920. Both emanated from the People's Art School, set up after the Revolution by Chagall in his native Vitebsk in the former Pale of Settlement, and taken over by Malevich. The "Futurist Strong Man" designed by Malevich in Vera Ermolaeva's staging brought to life his "Black Square", the famous painting which originated with his 1913 designs and launched the Suprematist movement. The unrealised staging by El Lissitzky, the key Jewish-Russian artist of the Soviet avant-garde, was to have incorporated electricity and machines, and would have been truly futuristic.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

Optional: students may purchase the following suggested book:

Questions? Read our 2022 Winter Program FAQ.

Rosamund Bartlett combines expertise in Russian cultural history with a particular interest in European modernism, opera, and the intersection between art and politics. She is the author and editor of several books, including Wagner and Russia and Shostakovich in Context as well as biographies of Chekhov and Tolstoy, whose works she has translated for Oxford World's Classics. Her co-edited volume on Victory over the Sun originated with her translation of the libretto for a 1999 staging in London. She spent fifteen years pursuing an academic career in the UK and US before becoming a full-time writer and translator based in Oxford, and continues to maintain an active scholarly profile. She has lectured at public institutions ranging from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.


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