Street Art of the Revolution: Festivals and Celebrations in Russia 1918-33

by Vladimir Tolstoy, Catherine Cooke, Irina Bibikova, etc.

Release Date: September, 1990

Edition: Hardcover

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Huge compendium of original source material on the subject

This book is listed in the bibliography of Bread and Puppet's book "Landscape and Desire", and since I am a maskmaker and a huge fan of Bread and Puppet I bought it. I did find it interesting to see how these Russian festivals may have influenced Bread and Puppet's work. What this book is, however, is a huge compendium of original material concerning street festivals in Soviet Russia from 1918 to 1933. It contains hundreds of photos and paintings on the subject, and gathers together what seems to be every single relevant report from Soviet books, magazines, newspapers, archives, organizational notes, festival plans, etc etc. The book also includes five essays which help point out some patterns and trends in this huge mass of material. However, the book does not attempt to give any more background, historical, political, or artistic, than is necessary to put its subject into a very basic context. I believe this book was meant as reference and research material, and as such it made for some exceedingly dry reading. I gave the book the rating that I did because it does what it sets out to do thoroughly and well. How useful a reader finds it, however, will depend on what they need from it. For original source material concerning Soviet street fairs it is a treasure. An in depth historical, political, or artistic analysis it is not, nor does it try to be.