Russian Pop Culture and the Avant-Garde, 1910–17

The topic of this paper is the engagement of the early Russian avant-garde and the creators of popular commercial culture with the print media and international trends in public expression. The paper will explore several levels of Russian visual culture, humor, and the medias reportage of artistic developments elsewhere in the world, as well as the reformulation of popular narrative genres such as the detective story. I will attempt to answer the question of how the avant-garde developed a public role before 1917 within the framework of popular culture and by implication how this shaped their collaboration with the Bolsheviks.