by Professor Evgeny Pavlov, MSH Invited Professor, Zurich University, Switzerland, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

MODERNITAS invites you for a lecture by its invited Professor Evgeny Pavlov

As time is that which gives modernism its name, modernism itself is, in a very real sense, a time machine factory. Modernist experiments often sought self-consciously to question and reconceptualize time by foregrounding the ways in which their own devices, often in concert with psychological, social, and historical mechanisms, structured and produced time.
Modernist experiments in Soviet Russia following the October revolution were especially concerned with time. The revolution, seen as a radical break with the past in the name of a utopian future that would release humanity from the empty time of linear history gave a major push to the cultural energies of the 1920s. The cultural turn of the early 1930s saw these energies extinguished as the explosive patchwork of artistic experiments and trends ossified in Socialist Realism.
While the revolutionary avant-garde is obsessed with running ahead of its own time, always chasing the future, in Stalinist culture, the future has already happened, and abstract time, in a certain sense, is already mastered because clock time could be transcended by heroic labour that can complete a five-year plan in four. But what happened to the genuinely modernist experiments that continued, post-1927, despite the regime’s facile pretences at having mastered time, to question what time is really all about?

The lecture examines the collision of the competing time machines, the grand machine of the overarching political narrative and the multiple subversive ones, constructed sometimes in plain view but oftentimes surreptitiously by Soviet modernists writing against the grain of Socialist Realism.

Evgeny Pavlov is Associate Professor of Russian and History at the University of Canterbury | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha in Ōtautahi | Christchurch, Aotearoa | New Zealand. He holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. He is the author of Shok pamiati: avtobiograficheskaia poetika Val’tera Ben’amina i Osipa Mandel’shtama (The Shock of Memory: Autobiographical Poetics of Walter Benjamin and Osip Mandelstam, Moscow: NLO, 2005) and editor of a number of volumes on Russian and comparative literature. Evgeny Pavlov’s principal area of research is Russian and European cultural and literary history of the 20th and 21st centuries. He is co-editor of the New Zealand Slavonic Journal and vice-president of the Australia and New Zealand Slavists’ Association.

Friday 6th November 2023, 2pm - 4pm

MSH reception room
Building DE1 - Level 3 - R.3.105
Avenue Antoine Depage 1
1000 Bruxelles

Free entrance