CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Neese-Todd, Joshua Colin |
|---|---|
| Title | A Southern Silver Age: Baku, Tiflis, and the Institutions of Literary Modernism in War and Revolution |
| Summary | In this thesis I follow the movements and activities of a group Russian’s fin de siècle literati as they negotiate the uncertain age of the First World War and Russia’s revolutions and civil wars. Like any good case study, the value of the story lies not only in its ability to illuminate a heretofore unknown corner of the history of Russian modernism, but also in the extent to which it provides a reassessment of more transcendent historical questions. By examining how refugee poets migrated from the imperial metropoles to the provincial cities of Tiflis (Tbilisi) and Baku, this effort engages with the historical literature on the connection between World War I and the Russian revolutions, the emergence and subordination of national states in the dissolution of empire, the building of early Soviet institutions, and the relationship between the intelligentsia and the state in the early years of Bolshevik power. At the broadest level, I assert that each of those historical paradigms falls short when asked to account for the biographies of these poets and so must be reexamined. More concretely I show how the material circumstances of survival in a collapsing state, and the opportunities provided in its reconstitution informed the actions of individual artists, and how those decisions, if briefly, determined the shape of early Soviet cultural institutions. |
| Supervisor | Miller, Alexei |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/neese-todd_joshua.pdf |
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