Ivan Aksenov.
Collected Works in Three Volumes
The collected writings of one of the most brilliant critics of early twentieth-century Russia.
Ivan Aksenov’s literary-critical essays represent the most distinctive and illuminating part of his intellectual legacy. Marked by incisiveness, irony, and a sharpness of perception, his work extends far beyond the literature of his contemporaries. Aksenov’s interests spanned Renaissance and early Baroque art, Elizabethan drama, the works of Shakespeare and other major playwrights. He was also the author of the world’s first monograph on Pablo Picasso and a pioneer in the analysis of theatrical direction, with foundational studies of Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Meyerhold.
Ivan Aksenov (1884–1935) was a literary scholar, art and literary critic, poet, and translator.
Editor and Introduction
Ivan G. Aksenov
Editor
Grigory Cheredov
Design
Ekaterina Lupanova
Layout
Ilyas Lochinov
Proofreader
Marina Nagrishko
Picasso, thank God, no longer needs advertising, and I, thank God as well, am not a professor of painting — so my judgments remain untainted by the burden of authority. If, however, my intentions happen to falter somewhere and I venture to recount “how things really went, ” I kindly ask you, dear reader, not to read these “abominations.” Skip those pages, just like good mothers skip certain passages when reading novels aloud to their daughters. Better still — don’t read any of it at all: just look at the pictures. And as for anyone who disagrees with me — all the worse for them.
Volume I features the landmark monograph Picasso and Surroundings, an exploration of the Spanish painter’s artistic development and the cultural landscape of Paris, alongside Hamlet and Other Essays in Aid of Russian Shakespeare Studies, a work that significantly contributed to Shakespearean scholarship in Russia. Volume II includes Sergei Eisenstein: Portrait of the Artist and Five Years of the Meyerhold Theatre: A Historical Sketch—both key texts in the history of Soviet avant-garde theatre. Volume III brings together a range of critical essays, reviews, and archival journal publications—many of them printed for the first time—on the works of Boris Pasternak, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ilya Ehrenburg, and other major figures of the time.
The original writings of Ivan Alexandrovich Aksenov are introduced with a series of conversations conducted by Ivan Grigoryevich Aksenov—the editor and compiler of this collected edition—with Naum Kleiman, Vladimir Makarov, Alessandro Farsetti, and Vadim Shcherbakov.