Street Art of the Revolution: Festivals and Celebrations in Russia 1918-33 by VladimirTolstoy; Irina Bibikova; Catherine CookeReview by: Catriona KellyThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Apr., 1991), pp. 353-355Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4210620 .

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REVIEWS 353

material concerning the more minor figures is valuable because so little information is available in English. In general, the essays are intelligent but, unfortunately, rather brief and the essentially narrative approach fails to convey adequately the distinct quality of each artist's creative explorations. The selection of documents that accompanies each text frequently includes material available elsewhere, notably in John Bowlt's invaluable compilation Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism I902-I930 (Thames and Hudson, I988). The occasional inclusion of unpublished material is tantaliz- ing and one wishes that more could have been supplied, and that more whole texts could have been used rather than snippets. Although some of the works have been reproduced elsewhere, those by less famous figures are previously unknown and it is useful to have them collected together.

Iablonskaia provides a clear overview of the way women artists conceived a role for themselves during a time of rapid change and revolution. She does not, however, really explain why women were able to make such a vital contribu- tion to artistic life at this time. She sketches in the broad historical and artistic context, but does not investigate important general factors such as the social position of women, their educational opportunities, and their participation in other fields, including the revolutionary struggle and women's liberation. Equally, there is no attempt to analyse the creative relationships which these 'Amazons' of the avant-garde had with their male partners: such as Gon- charova with Larionov, Rozanova with Kruchenykh, and Stepanova with Rodchenko. Male colleagues and influences are mentioned, but they are not examined in any depth, so that considerable creative tensions are glossed over.

The text has been well edited, which makes it an even greater pity that 'Rayonism', the French translation of Luchizm is used instead of the English translation, Rayism, and that some errors remain. For instance, Tret'iakov wrote the play The Earth in Turmoil (and not Trotskii, p. II4), and the Vkhutemas/Vkhutein closed in I930, SO Udal'tsova could not have worked there up to I 934 (p. I 69). Despite its shortcomings, this is a useful introduction to a fascinating subject that calls for further study and research. Department ofArt History CHRISTINA LODDER

University ofSt Andrews

Tolstoy, Vladimir; Bibikova, Irina; and Cooke, Catherine (eds). Street Art of the Revolution: Festivals and Celebrations in Russia i9i8-33. Thames and Hudson, London, I990. 240 pp. 85 colour, I35 black-and-white plates. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?30.00.

THE bulk of this handsome volume is made up of photographs of, and documents relating to, the May I and November 7 demonstrations in Lenin- grad and Moscow, beginning in the first days of Bolshevik power. Catherine Cooke has selected the material from a two-volume study published in Russian by Vladimir Tolstoi and Irina Bibikova in I 984, and contributed three articles introducing the different chronological sections: I9I8-I9, I920-26, I927-33.

What the English-speaking reader has lost in breadth of source material could have been made up in sophistication of analysis, for the area of mass

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354 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

culture has been ill served by Soviet secondary study to date. But unfortun- ately this is an opportunity missed. Cooke engages little with recent Western research; she does not refer, for example, to Peter Kenez's The Birth of the Propaganda State (Cambridge, I985) even in her bibliography, and her intro- ductory sections repeat the orthodox line stated by her Soviet co-editors in their prefaces. Cooke's dependence is especially clear where she sums up the rationale of her edition: 'The focus is not upon the big name artists ... On the contrary, the intention has been to present a balanced picture of how these festivals developed ... and most of it shows a movement of genuinely popular self-expression' (p. 34).

In fact, 'popularity' is a question raised, rather than solved, by this book. There is no doubt that large numbers of working-class people did attend and take part in these festivals, but there is little indication here that their participation was anything but passive. The reader of this book could search in vain for any hint that there was a background of administrative regulations inhibiting alternative forms of popular expression; but it is clear, even from the documentary material which is included, that official agencies organized and orchestrated these spectacles, in which the workers, as one text of I 920 puts it, were but 'performers' (p. 124). And it was precisely big-name artists such as Dobuzhinskii, Kuznetsov, Kustodiev, Al'tman, Shterenberg, Annenkov, Petrov-Vodkin and Popova, who were responsible for many of the designs used to decorate the squares and streets. Even after I923, when the Moscow Committee of the Communist Party declared an end to 'rigid centralisation' (p. I44), the celebrations still took place along far from spontaneous lines: slogans were chosen in advance, and floats manufactured to the designs of such organizations as IZORAM (The Workers' Organization for the Fine Arts). Many of the floats and street installations which appear anonymously here were probably the work of trained designers: to name one example, the float in plate I I 2 was the invention not of an unknown factory hand but of the popular theatre entrepreneur A. Ia. Alekseev-Iakovlev.

In short, what appears here is art for the people, not art of the people. -Moreover, the book presents no direct evidence to show how the workers perceived these spectacles. The documentation comes entirely from official or intellectual sources, such as the minutes of official meetings, the memoirs of artists and designers, and the deliberations of sociologists. In consequence, we have a reasonable idea ofwhat the ruling elite supposed the masses wanted, and the lines of the debate between avant-garde and traditional art are clear. But no voices speak to us directly from the factory floor. Cooke tries to fill the gap by arguing that the celebrations succeeded because 'such events were traditional, even habitual, in the everyday life of a Russian' (p. 35). This is convincing only up to a point. The revolutionary festivals surely recalled religious and official events such as the coronation celebrations or holy day processions: but one wonders how successful their allusions to street theatre and popular entertain- ment can have been, given that these genres were explicitly commercial and depended on a very direct kind of audience participation. Certainly, street shows appear here only in altered form: the Petrushka puppet show in plate I 67 has two operators rather than the one which the exigencies of the street demanded, and the puppets include 'agitational' figures such as a priest.

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REVIEWS 355

But as an indication of what Soviet mass festivals looked like, as opposed to how they were organized or what they meant, this book could hardly be bettered. A wealth of illustrations records the shift from the folksy and two-dimensional forms of the early years, with their allusions to shop-sign painting and the lubok, to the streamlined and architectural installations of the late twenties, where the reference is, rather, to factory design. If much of the early material is familiar from such sources as Mikhail German's Art of the October Revolution (Moscow, I979), much of the later is not nearly so well known. The illustrations also contribute to the history of that international genre, public art. There is a direct line between the constructivist sculptures here and those purchased by Western corporations in the sixties, and the three-dimensional floats, such as the papier-mache galosh propelled by workers in plate 14I, would not look at all out of place in a City of Oxford carnival. Christ Church CATRIONA KELLY

Oxford

Skirball, Sheba F. (ed.). Films of the Holocaust. An Annotated Filmography of Collections in Israel. Garland Filmographies, vol. 2. Garland Reference Library of Social Science, vol. 463. Garland, New York and London, I990. XXiX + 273 pp. Illustrations. Indexes. $42.00.

THIS book is quite simply what it claims to be: a comprehensive listing of all film and video material relating to the Holocaust currently held in Israeli archives. The volume was prepared under the auspices of the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive, the largest depository ofJewish documentary materials in the world, which is jointly owned and run by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the World Zionist Organization.

The editor has quite rightly interpreted the brief 'Films of the Holocaust' as widely as possible, so that the filmography includes not only rough-cuts and contemporary-release newsreel footage such as Deutsche Wochenschau, but also later documentary films about the period, such as Resnais's Nuit et brouillard or the relevant episodes from The World at War. The coverage of feature films is similarly catholic, ranging from the anti-Semitic, I 940 UFA propaganda film Aktien auf Waterloo (also known as Die Rothschilds, a distorted version of the family history) to Cabaret and The Boys from Brazil. Rather surprisingly, there appear to be no copies in Israel of the two major and pro-Semitic Soviet films about the Nazi persecution of theJews: Professor Mamlock and Sem'ia Oppengeim (The Oppenheim Family), both released in I 938, although coverage of material from other Eastern European sources is more comprehensive. In the new climate of rather hesitant rapprochement between the Soviet Union and Israel, perhaps Gosfil'mofond might like to rectify this omission.

Each of the I,045 entries gives the fullest possible production credits and other relevant details, a brief synopsis of the contents of the footage and a note of the item's location in Israel. For those scholars who, as the Foreword puts it, 'have come to recognize the legitimacy of film footage as an additional source of understanding a particular event, place, person or period', an annotated

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