Imagining the Unimaginable - 9780803215474

Imagining the UnimaginableWorld War, Modern Art, and the Politics of Public Culture in Russia, 1914-1917\nAuthor(s): Aaron J. Cohen\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: University of Nebraska Press, United States\nImprint: University of Nebraska Press\nISBN-13: 9780803215474, 978-0803215474\nSynopsis\nAs World War I shaped and molded European culture to an unprecedented degree, it also had a profound influence on the politics and aesthetics of early-twentieth-century Russian culture. In this provocative and fascinating work, Aaron J. Cohen shows how World War I changed Russian culture and especially Russian art. A wartime public culture destabilized conventional patterns in cultural politics and aesthetics and fostered a new artistic world by integrating the iconoclastic avant-garde into the art establishment and mass culture. This new wartime culture helped give birth to nonobjective abstraction (including Kazimir Malevich's famous Black Square), which revolutionized modern aesthetics. Of ""