Vladimir Paperny

Vom 18. bis 20. September 2014 versammelten sich an der Universitat Potsdam kultur- und filmwissenschaftlich arbeitende Wissenschaftler zu einem Andrej Tarkovskij gewidmeten Symposium, dem ersten internationalen. Die 25 Teilnehmer kamen namlich aus neun Landern. Dadurch, dass nicht wenige auch eine – wie man heute sagt – „Migrationsbiographie“ haben, potenzierte sich die durch die jeweils unterschiedliche Herkunft bedingte Multiperspektivik, zu der jedoch der Modus der Wissenschaftlichkeit ein deutlich relativierendes Korrektiv bildet. Der vorliegende Band enthalt im Wesentlichen die dort vorgestellten Beitrage, aber auch die der Fachleute, die nicht personlich hatten nach Potsdam kommen konnen.

The book is a collection of nine essays analyzing major European international and national expositions, such as the International Exposition in Paris, 1937; the VSKhV (the All-Union Agriculture Exposition) in Moscow, 1937; the EUR exhibition in Rome, 1942; the London South Bank Exposition, 1951; and Expo 58 in Brussels. The book emphasizes architecture and exhibition planning as a form of diplomacy. With its focus on the years between 1937 and 1959, the diplomacy discussed in this book was inextricably connected to the Second World War and to the beginning of the Cold War, the creation of the European Union and the Soviet Bloc. The choice to focus on the European expositions is dictated by an intention to investigate the effects of war tensions on the planning of the events and on its representation in the architecture of individual pavilions. The book contributes to the history of World’s Fairs and of exhibition design, a field of research that has proved to sustain a high level of interest among architectural historians, scholars from other academic disciplines, and a larger audience beyond academia. It also re-investigates the history and historiography of twentieth-century architecture in general. The complex relationship between architecture and war is a major theme that spans the entire book (preface, introduction, 9 chapters and epilogue). This theme is related to another theoretical issue: representation and representativeness in architecture, planning, and design. While focusing on exhibition architecture, these two themes allow for a new perspective on the evolution of modern architecture, its oft-mentioned transitioning from the radical and contested stand of interwar Europe to the so called “permissiveness” and “omnipresence” of the 1950s.

Vladimir Paperny's two chapters from a future book include memoirs of his collaboration with the late film critic, cultural historian and the coauthor of the internationally acclaimed documentary "Ordinary Fascism" (1965) Maya Turovskaya (1924-2019). It also includes a transcript of his dialog with Turovskaya on the similarities between Soviet and American films of 1930s-1940s.

This book investigates architecture as a form of diplomacy in the context of the Second World War at six major European international and national expositions that took place between 1937 and ’59. The volume gives a fascinating account of architecture assuming the role of the carrier of war-related messages, some of them camouflaged while others quite frank. The book provides a novel assessment of modern architecture’s involvement with national representation it also argues that this widespread confidence in architecture’s ability to act as a propaganda tool was one of the reasons why Modernist architecture lent itself to the service of such different masters.

This chapter deals with temporary Soviet architecture— exposition pavilions and set design for films during the interwar period. It will be viewed through the lens of the concept of life-building (zhiznestroenie), which can be traced to Russian writers and philosophers of the 19th century. Having started in a Positivist mode, by the end of the 19th century the concept acquired strong religious connotations. After the October revolution of 1917, the idea was picked up by Marxist theoreticians and Constructivists and understood as building a new society and a new human being. During the Stalin epoch, the concept morphed into vague images of Communism, whose arrival was placed into an undefined distant future. In a sense, the idea went back to its Symbolist and quasi-religious form. I will trace the transformations of the idea of life-building as it was going back and forth between practical and symbolic forms. I will also attempt to analyze how the idea of life-building was used in a dialog (and confrontation) with the West.

Биография Айн Рэнд, написанная ее ученицей Барбарой Брэнден, как будто написана двумя разными людьми. Некоторые страницы написаны восторженной ученицей, другие — холодным трезвым аналитиком, который пытается понять, как ученица оказалась втянутой в культ. «Объективизм» Айн Рэнд вполне можно считать культом — без убийств, но с нанесением серьезных психологических травм.

In the late 1930s, two prominent European writers, the French André Gide and the German Lion Feuchtwanger published books about their recent trips to the Soviet Union. Both writers belonged to minorities – Gide as a homosexual, Feuchtwanger as a Jew – and in the Soviet Union they were seeking solutions to the problems of their own countries: growing inequality, culture and intellectual freedom suffering under capitalism and emerging Nazism, private ownership as a barrier to rational organization of cities, discrimination against minorities. Both were pro-Soviet prior to the trips; Gide changed his mind, Feuchtwanger remained a sympathizer afterwards.