|
Showing 1 - 6 of
6 matches in All Departments
The book argues that Jews were not a people apart but were
culturally integrated in Russian society. In their diasporic
cultural creations Russia's Jews employed the general themes of
artists under tsars and Soviets, but they modified these themes to
fit their own needs. The result was a hybrid, Russian-Jewish
culture, unique and dynamic. Few today consider that Jewish Eastern
Europe, the "old world", was in fact a power incubator of modern
Jewish consciousness. Brian Horowitz, a well-known scholar of
Russian Jewry, presents essays on Jewish education (the heder),
historiography, literature and Jewish philosophy that intersect
with contemporary interests on the big questions of Jewish life.
The book lets us grasp the meaning of secular Judaism and gives
models from the past in order to stimulate ideas for the present.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the photographer Sergey
Prokudin-Gorsky undertook a quest to document an empire that was
undergoing rapid change due to industrialization and the building
of railroads. Between 1903 and 1916 Prokudin-Gorsky, who developed
a pioneering method of capturing color images on glass plates,
scoured the Russian Empire with the patronage of Nicholas II.
Intrepidly carrying his cumbersome and awkward camera from the
western borderlands over the Volga River to Siberia and central
Asia, he created a singular record of Imperial Russia. In 1918
Prokudin-Gorsky escaped an increasingly chaotic, violent Russia and
regained nearly 2,000 of his bulky glass negatives. His subsequent
peripatetic existence before settling in Paris makes his
collection's survival all the more miraculous. The U.S. Library of
Congress acquired Prokudin-Gorsky's collection in 1948, and since
then it has become a touchstone for understanding pre-revolutionary
Russia. Now digitized and publicly available, his images are a
sensation in Russia, where people visit websites dedicated to them.
William Craft Brumfield-photographer, scholar, and the leading
authority on Russian architecture in the West-began working with
Prokudin-Gorsky's photographs in 1985. He curated the first public
exhibition of them in the United States and has annotated the
entire collection. In Journeys through the Russian Empire,
Brumfield-who has spent decades traversing Russia and photographing
buildings and landscapes in their various stages of disintegration
or restoration-juxtaposes Prokudin-Gorsky's images against those he
took of the same buildings and areas. In examining the
intersections between his own photography and that of
Prokudin-Gorsky, Brumfield assesses the state of preservation of
Russia's architectural heritage and calls into question the
nostalgic assumptions of those who see Prokudin-Gorsky's images as
the recovery of the lost past of an idyllic, pre-Soviet Russia.
This lavishly illustrated volume-which features some 400 stunning
full-color images of ancient churches and mosques, railways and
monasteries, towns and remote natural landscapes-is a testament to
two brilliant photographers whose work prompts and illuminates,
monument by monument, questions of conservation, restoration, and
cultural identity and memory.
Carpeted in boreal forests, dotted with lakes, cut by rivers, and
straddling the Arctic Circle, the region surrounding the White Sea,
which is known as the Russian North, is sparsely populated and
immensely isolated. It is also the home to architectural marvels,
as many of the original wooden and brick churches and homes in the
region's ancient villages and towns still stand. Featuring nearly
two hundred full color photographs of these beautiful centuries-old
structures, Architecture at the End of the Earth is the most recent
addition to William Craft Brumfield's ongoing project to
photographically document all aspects of Russian architecture. The
architectural masterpieces Brumfield photographed are diverse: they
range from humble chapels to grand cathedrals, buildings that are
either dilapidated or well cared for, and structures repurposed
during the Soviet era. Included are onion-domed wooden churches
such as the Church of the Dormition, built in 1674 in Varzuga; the
massive walled Transfiguration Monastery on Great Solovetsky
Island, which dates to the mid-1550s; the Ferapontov-Nativity
Monastery's frescoes, painted in 1502 by Dionisy, one of Russia's
greatest medieval painters; nineteenth-century log houses, both
rustic and ornate; and the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Vologda,
which was commissioned by Ivan the Terrible in the 1560s. The text
that introduces the photographs outlines the region's significance
to Russian history and culture. Brumfield is challenged by the
immense difficulty of accessing the Russian North, and recounts
traversing sketchy roads, crossing silt-clogged rivers on barges
and ferries, improvising travel arrangements, being delayed by
severe snowstorms, and seeing the region from the air aboard the
small planes he needs to reach remote areas. The buildings
Brumfield photographed, some of which lie in near ruin, are at
constant risk due to local indifference and vandalism, a lack of
maintenance funds, clumsy restorations, or changes in local and
national priorities. Brumfield is concerned with their futures and
hopes that the region's beautiful and vulnerable achievements of
master Russian carpenters will be preserved. Architecture at the
End of the Earth is at once an art book, a travel guide, and a
personal document about the discovery of this bleak but beautiful
region of Russia that most readers will see here for the first
time.
Twentieth Anniversary Edition, with a new preface by the author,
available in June 2015 The twentieth century in Russia has been a
cataclysm of rare proportions, as war, revolution, famine, and
massive political terror tested the limits of human endurance. The
results of this assault on Russian culture are particularly evident
in ruined architectural monuments, some of which are little known
even within Russia itself. Over the past four decades William Craft
Brumfield, noted historian and photographer of Russian
architecture, has traveled throughout Russia and photographed many
of these neglected, lost buildings, poignant and haunting in their
ruin. Lost Russia provides a unique view of Brumfield's acclaimed
work, which illuminates Russian culture as reflected in these
remnants of its distinctive architectural traditions. Capturing the
quiet, ineffable beauty that graces these buildings, these
photographs are accompanied by a text that provides not only a
brief historical background for Russian architecture, but also
Brumfield's personal impressions, thoughts, and insights on the
structures he views. Churches and monasteries from the fifteenth to
the twentieth century as well as abandoned, ruined manor houses are
shown-ravaged by time, willful neglect, and cultural vandalism.
Brumfield also illustrates examples of recent local initiatives to
preserve cultural landmarks from steady decline and destruction.
Concluding with photographs of the remarkable log architecture
found in Russia's far north, Lost Russia is a book for all those
concerned with the nation's cultural legacy, history, and
architecture, and with historic and cultural preservation
generally. It will also interest those who appreciate the fine art
of exceptional photography.
|
You may like...
Catan
(16)
R889
Discovery Miles 8 890
|