Aesopian tales

The focus of this dissertation is to further complicate the conventional binary codification of Russian avant-garde and socialist realism, and to argue against the oft-posited occurrence of a decisive break between the two. Seeking to offer a comprehensive analysis of Stalinist visual culture, this dissertation is structured around close readings of two test cases, culled from a different visual media. Each test case takes as its subject an iconic figure of each aesthetic episteme: the painter Kazimir Malevich is the focus of the first, while the filmmaker Grigorii Aleksandrov is featured in the second. Their work of the nineteen thirties forms the basis for an examination of the status of the artist under authoritarianism and the overt systemic ratification of the socialist realist apparatus while uncovering the incongruent formalism that persists underneath. Malevich's and Aleksandrov's production of the nineteen thirties is considered as encapsulating the liminal space wedged between polar constructions, a space that is termed the late Russian avant-garde. The main thesis presented here is that an Aesopian property characterized artifacts produced by the culture of the nineteen thirties. Subsumed under this umbrella term are the various strategies and artistic devices employed to convey ambiguity and alterity, to produce a sense of hesitation in interpretation. All are engaged in navigating between ostensible surrender to socialist realism and the retention of formalist concerns. By arguing for the existence of Aesopian language as a dominant cultural code of the nineteen thirties, this dissertation offers a humanistic continuation paradigm that traces history through concatenation, revealing pockets of alterity that ripple throughout.