Reorientalism - (Modernist Latitudes) by Nariman Skakov

About the Book

Nariman Skakov offers a new way to understand Soviet modernism, showing how writers and artists looked to the East to renew avant-garde experimentalism under Stalin.

Book Synopsis

It is commonly believed that Stalinism ended a vibrant period in Soviet avant-garde art and literature. The triumph of socialist realism, in this view, curtailed experimentation with aesthetic form and replaced it with a call for clarity, accessibility, and ideological conformity. But Stalin's formula "national in form, socialist in content" gave artists an opening for officially sanctioned formal innovation--as long as it drew on the national cultures of the Soviet Union.

Nariman Skakov offers a new way to understand Soviet modernism, showing how writers and artists looked to the East to renew avant-garde experimentalism under Stalin. He traces how figures such as Victor Shklovsky, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei Eisenstein responded to the Soviet state's ideological demands by engaging with the traditions of the new socialist republics in Central Asia. The concept of national form gave these artists a sanctuary for aesthetic innovation, yet this experimentation relied on exoticization of the "strangeness" of the Soviet East and a fascination with ethnic others.

Recasting Soviet aesthetics from the vantage point of Central Asia, Skakov rethinks orientalism and its relationship to socialism. Challenging conventional narratives of the fate of the Soviet avant-garde, Reorientalism provides a deeply original decentering of modernism.

Review Quotes

With dazzling erudition, Skakov shatters the spatial and temporal coordinates of Soviet modernism through its little-known encounters with Central Asia and Stalinist "national form"--encounters that enabled sustained artistic experimentation even amid the turn to socialist realism. The result is a transformative view of both the avant-garde's fascination with the other and the early Soviet Union's decolonizing claims.--Steven S. Lee, author of The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution

About the Author

Nariman Skakov is associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University. He is the author of The Cinema of Tarkovsky: Labyrinths of Space and Time (2012).