Fast Forward (The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910-1930)

Life in the modernist era not only moved, it sped. As automobiles, airplanes, and motion pictures, among other technological advances, proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century, speed transformed contemporary reality, generating new possibilities not only for everyday existence, but also for modernist culture. From Manhattan to Milan to Moscow, the rise of modernism coincided with a precipitous acceleration in the pace of human experience that may artists celebrated. Speed was soon aestheticized and converted from an ordinary, physical concept into a unique source of inspiration. Although modernism arrived somewhat late in Russia, the increased tempo of life at the start of the twentieth century provided Russia’s avant-garde movement with an infusion of creative dynamism and crucial momentum for its revolutionary experimentation. Fast Forward: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910-1930 presents a detailed examination of the ideas and images of speed that permeated Russian modernist poetry, painting, and cinema. In probing this cultural phenomenon, which began in the early 1910s and continued to the late 1920s when formal innovation in the arts was overtaken by Stalin’s Five-Year Plans for rapid Soviet industrialization, Fast Forward explores how the idea of speed propelled the nation’s arts toward abstraction as well as toward the ideal of a dynamic, streamlined future. Speed, used as a powerful conceptual means for breaking down the figurative stasis of traditional representational art, provided the basis for a comprehensive reevaluation of everyday reality. Fostering a broad understanding of velocity, Russian avant-garde poets, painters, and filmmakers raced to establish a new artistic and social reality.