Soviet Factography - by Devin Fore (Hardcover)

About the Book

"All the Graphs is the first full study of factography, an aesthetic movement in Soviet modernism that flourished briefly in the 1920s before Stalinism took hold. Devin Fore charts the movement through the work of its key figures, most prominently writer Sergei Tret'iakov, and its position in the material culture of the early Soviet period. Factography was a set of photography and film practices preoccupied with the inscription of facts. The movement was related to several contemporary efforts throughout the world to forge a basis for the production of documentary projects. Committed to a present uncoupled from both the past and the future, the factographers were engaged in chronicling modernization and how it was transforming human experience and society. Fore explains how it is impossible to comprehend the factographic project without considering the explosion of new media technologies and their mass-cultural formations: radio broadcasting, sound in film, photo-media innovations that allowed the illustrated press to flourish. New media became ordinary facts of life, and the factographers made it their mission to document the great industrial campaigns of the day-the promulgation of "progress." All the Graphs elucidates how the factographers created heterogenous, experimental techniques of documentation responsive to the new social and cultural realities of Soviet Russia and, as Fore demonstrates, distinct from our current, codified concept of documentary. This fascinating intellectual history of early Soviet materialist thought is required reading for anyone interested in Soviet culture, the interwar avant-gardes, aesthetics, and the theory of documentary"--

Book Synopsis

A study of Soviet factography, an avant-garde movement that employed photography, film, journalism, and mass media technologies.

This is the first major English-language study of factography, an avant-garde movement of 1920s modernism. Devin Fore charts this style through the work of its key figures, illuminating factography's position in the material culture of the early Soviet period and situating it as a precursor to the genre of documentary that arose in the 1930s. Factographers employed photography and film practices in their campaign to inscribe facts and to chronicle modernization as it transformed human experience and society. Fore considers factography in light of the period's explosion of new media technologies--including radio broadcasting, sound in film, and photo-media innovations--that allowed the press to transform culture on a massive scale.

This theoretically driven study uses material from Moscow archives and little-known sources to highlight factography as distinct from documentary and Socialist Realism and to establish it as one of the major twentieth-century avant-garde forms. Fore covers works of photography, film, literature, and journalism together in his considerations of Soviet culture, the interwar avant-gardes, aesthetics, and the theory of documentary.

Review Quotes

"In Soviet Factography, Fore examines a development in early Soviet culture (primarily literature and film) that attempted to harness revolutionary energy in radically new expressions of human consciousness based on an immediate flow of facts. Topics covered range from the denial of traditional art as a model for revolutionary culture to the phenomenology of news. . . . Summing Up: Recommended."--Choice

"[Fore reveals] a fascinating array of original strategies to record a world turned upside down. We follow all manner of 'factographic' authors and artists (writer Sergei Tret'iakov and filmmaker Dziga Vertov are only the best known) as they scramble to register the revolution as immediately as possible. . . . This riveting study of 'reality in revolution' pressures our understanding of both terms; it also shows us how a reordering of any society involves a refashioning of its individuals. . . . Fore thus reclaims a lost period of tremendous innovation, which renders Soviet Factography an important intervention in our own present as well: Its recovery of documentary practices counts as an indirect riposte to the purveyors of disinformation today."--Hal Foster "Chronicle of Higher Education, on "The Best Scholarly Books of 2024""

"In Soviet Factography Fore explores this tumultuous era via factography, an avant-garde practice that peaked during the Cultural Revolution (1928-31) and drew on the new mass media of photography, film and radio in an attempt to chronicle Soviet life in real time. . . . Fore tackles this unwieldy subject via scrupulous archival work and judicious comparisons with modernist experiments elsewhere--notably Weimar Germany, his other area of expertise. He is fluent in political and aesthetic theory, and the book hums with offhand references to figures such as Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx and Michel Foucault."-- "Times Literary Supplement"

"Remarkable. Through an intricately woven combination of intellectual history and theoretical analysis, Fore presents Soviet factography as a daring experiment in capturing the experience of revolutionary time. A work of sophisticated argumentation that combines deep research with intellectual breadth, theoretical dexterity, and a lively style, Soviet Factography will be required reading for anyone concerned with early Soviet culture, European modernism, Marxist and materialist aesthetics, and the theory of documentary."--Edward Tyerman, University of California, Berkeley

"This is a rich new history of the Soviet avant-garde's 'factographic' dream. Fore has a rare ability to reveal the life force of ideas in this most utopian of periods. Deftly navigating the complex theoretical milieu of the 1920s, he draws suggestive connections between and across diverse fields, assembling a vibrant cast of characters (Sergei Tret'iakov, Viktor Pertsov, Nikolai Chuzhak, and others), to uncover their shared ambition: to save literature and art--and the world--through the discipline of facts."--Emma Widdis, University of Cambridge

"This is a work of profound insight, with astonishing intellectual breadth. Focusing on an exciting but short-lived episode in early Soviet culture, Fore explores the shifting boundary between reality and consciousness, a matter of perpetual concern for philosophers and artists alike. Through their ruthless campaign against the mediations of the artistic image, the factographers made reality more transcendent than ever. Fore's book opens an exciting chapter in cultural history that helps us understand the great iconoclastic movements of modernity."--Boris Gasparov, Columbia University

"Soviet Factography is a brilliant, fascinating, and essential work. Jam-packed with original research and nuggets of insight, it is a monumental achievement and a major intellectual event. Fore brings to life a crucial movement in the 1920s, recreating the excitement and the intense debates among writers, artists, and intellectuals who were engaged in the projecting of building a new communist society. He carefully describes the emergence of factography, in all its political-intellectual-aesthetic inventiveness and urgency. It's thrilling work."--Jonathan Flatley, Wayne State University, author of "Like Andy Warhol"

"Has there ever been such an efflorescence of artistic and technical experimentation as in the Soviet years surrounding 1930? This brief and shining moment, in which everything seemed possible, has found its interpreter in Fore. Those wanting to understand, and maybe break, the fact-morphing media worlds we inhabit today will find both congenial ancestors and a brilliant guide here to think with."--John Durham Peters, Yale University

"What does revolution require of writers, artists, photographers, and filmmakers? With extraordinary archival diligence and theoretical intelligence, Fore recovers a fascinating array of nearly lost experiments that address this question more radically than ever before or since. Revealed here are unprecedented strategies to document the factuality of a transformed world as immediately as possible--to document it without arresting it but, on the contrary, by dynamizing it anew. This study of 'reality in revolution' in the Soviet Union is the perfect complement to Fore's equally masterful survey of 'realism after modernism' in Germany during the same period. It is also, tacitly, a powerful riposte to the purveyors of deceit and disinformation in our own time."--Hal Foster, Princeton University