MONUMENTS FOR POSTERITY Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time

KALASHNIKOV Antony

ISBN 10: 1501768638 / ISBN 13: 9781501768637

Published by Cornell University Press, 2023. 9781501768637, 2023

About this Item

1st edn. 8vo. Original yellow lettered light grey cloth (Fine), dustwrapper (Fine). Pp. x + 202, illus with b&w photos in text (no inscriptions).

Seller Inventory # 185590

Bibliographic Details

• Title: MONUMENTS FOR POSTERITY Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time
• Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2023. 9781501768637
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501768638
• ISBN 13: 9781501768637
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • Modern History

About this title

Synopsis

Monuments for Posterity challenges the common assumption that Stalinist monuments were constructed with an immediate, propagandistic function, arguing instead that they were designed to memorialize the present for an imagined posterity. In this respect, even while pursuing its monument-building program with a singular ruthlessness and on an unprecedented scale, the Stalinist regime was broadly in step with transnational monument-building trends of the era and their undergirding cultural dynamics.

By integrating approaches from cultural history, art criticism, and memory studies, along with previously unexplored archival material, Antony Kalashnikov examines the origin and implementation of the Stalinist monument-building program from the perspective of its goal to "immortalize the memory" of the era. He analyzes how this objective affected the design and composition of Stalinist monuments, what cultural factors prompted the sudden and powerful yearning to be remembered, and most importantly, what the culture of self-commemoration revealed about changing outlooks on the future―both in the Soviet Union and beyond its borders.

Monuments for Posterity shifts the perspective from monuments' political-ideological content to the desire to be remembered and prompts a much-needed reconsideration of the supposed uniqueness of both Stalinist aesthetics and the temporal culture that they expressed. Many Stalinist monuments still stand prominently in postsocialist cityscapes and remain the subject of continual heated political controversy. Kalashnikov makes manifest monuments' intentional attempts to seduce us―the "posterity" for whom they were built.

About the Author

Antony Kalashnikov is Postdoctoral Fellow in History at the University of Waterloo.