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Please join the next Slavic Colloquium talk by Alessandro Farsetti (Professor of Russian Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice).

Between Demons and “A New Heaven”: Picasso in Russia

Why did Picasso arouse such strong interest among Russian intellectuals at the beginning of the 20th century? The first monograph on the painter was written by Russian futurist critic and poet Ivan Aksenov and published in Moscow in 1917. In what respect did this monograph differ from other contemporary critical essays on the Spanish artist published in Russia and Western Europe (Guillaume Apollinaire, Ardengo Soffici, Nikolai Berdiaev, Oleksandr Shevchenko, Oleksa Hryshchenko, et al.)? Avant-garde artists considered Picasso as a source of inspiration for their own radical visual experiments. Some of them regarded his cubist painting as a way to transcend our three-dimensional world. Religious philosophers sensed in Picasso’s works the clearest sign of the demise of human-centered Christian art, which had started in the Renaissance.

Alessandro Farsetti is Professor of Russian Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His fields of research span the poetics of early 20th century Russian avant-garde, Soviet popular culture, travel literature, contemporary Russian poetry. He has published a monograph on Ivan Aksenov’s futurist poetry (Firenze University Press, 2017) and a critical edition of his complete poems.