Geographies of Peripheral Modernism: The Case of the Russian Avant-Garde (Khlebnikov, Eisenstein, Tretyakov)

The essay explores the extent to which geographical location and imagination might shape notions of peripheral modernism. It takes as its examples work by a number of Russian avant-garde writers and artists produced before and after the political revolution of 1917. The essay attempts to identify the aesthetic and political significance of the imaginative geographies conveyed in this work, and how it shapes perceptions of Russian and Soviet space as well as the shifting places of the Russian avant-garde within the European context. The essay suggests, finally, that imaginative geographies may be indicative of the (self-)positioning of peripheral modernism caught up in the tension between the uneven developments of artistic radicalism and political modernisation.