Colleen McQuillen - Böcker

Masked and costume balls thrived in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during a period of rich literary and theatrical experimentation. The first study of its kind, The Modernist Masquerade examines the cultural history of masquerades in Russia and their representations in influential literary works.The masquerade's widespread appearance as a literary motif in works by such writers as Anna Akhmatova, Leonid Andreev, Andrei Bely, Aleksandr Blok, and Fyodor Sologub mirrored its popularity as a leisure-time activity and illuminated its integral role in the Russian modernist creative consciousness. Colleen McQuillen charts how the political, cultural, and personal significance of lavish costumes and other forms of self-stylising evolved in Russia over time. She shows how their representations in literature engaged in dialog with the diverse aesthetic trends of Decadence, Symbolism, and Futurism and with the era's artistic philosophies.

The enmeshment of the human body with various forms of technology is a phenomenon that characterises lived and imagined experiences in Russian arts of the modernist and postmodernist eras. In contrast to the post-revolutionary fixation on mechanical engineering, industrial progress, and the body as a machine, the postmodern, post-industrial period probes the meaning of being human not only from a physical, bodily perspective, but also from the philosophical perspectives of subjectivity and consciousness. The Human Reimagined examines the ways in which literary and artistic representations of the body, selfhood, subjectivity, and consciousness illuminate late- and post-Soviet ideas about the changing relationships among the individual, the environment, technology, and society.