The Diaries of Nikolay Punin
1904-1953
-
- $32.99
-
- $32.99
Publisher Description
Nikolay Punin (1888-1953) was the most articulate Russian/Soviet art critic of the 1920s. He strongly advocated Constructivism, an avant-garde impulse that favored mechanomorphic abstraction and proclaimed a movement to bring art into the center of popular life. In the United States, he is perhaps best remembered for his love affair with Anna Akhmatova, one of the great poets of the twentieth century.
This volume presents the first English translation of ten diary notebooks that Punin wrote between 1915 and 1936, as well as selections from his earlier (1904-1910) and later (1941-1946) diaries and some thirty notes and letters relating to his affair with Anna Akhmatova. These materials offer a rare glimpse into the life of art and artists in Russia. They also present vivid scenes from the 1905 Revolution, World War I, the 1917 Revolutions, World War II, and Stalinist oppression through the reflections of a talented man, who, unlike many of his generation, lived to tell the tale.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a lengthy introduction by Monas, an emeritus professor of Slavic languages and history at Texas, the case is made that Punin (1888-1953) was a major figure in the avant-garde Russian Futurist and Constructivist schools. The evidence, however, is not to be found in these rather brief diary notebooks. According to Monas, Punin "identified himself with the Futurist rejection of sentimentality, of obsession with the nuances of individual psychology.... " But except for one discussion of the mechanics of an airplane, the diary extracts (competently translated by co-editor Krupata) show him, rather, as an emotional person wrapped up in himself and his amorous affairs, with almost no perceptible interest in the artistic movement with which he was apparently involved. (He does, however, refer briefly to the 1905 revolution and both world wars.) Some interest emerges when he maunders over poet Anna Akhmatova, one of whose many lovers he was, and when he writes--letters and even reminiscences are interleaved with the fragmentary diaries--of his two imprisonments by Stalin's thought police for "cosmopolitanism." Toward the end, in 1952, he writes graphically of reading in the gulag with difficulty, as there was one bulb shared by 200 inmates--"And it hung from the ceiling at a height of 7 meters." He died in prison camp, occasioning an Akhmatova poem grieving that his heart will no longer respond to her voice. A biographical glossary identifies the many names in the text unknown to most readers. 20 b&w illus.
