Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.13 (535 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0847836053 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-04-15 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Fascinating and fun read Anna Kezer A great tribute to things all strange, ugly, and ubiquitous in the Soviet Union. Each story contains a photograph of the subject, its history of joining the culture, and sometimes an interesting essay with one of the writer's perspective of what the subject meant to them in the days of their youth.I greatly enjoyed a trip back the memory lane and the light humor of the stories. Highly recommend to anyone interested in a quick tour into particulars of an everyday life of Soviet Union.. Loved This Book! Josie Louise I bought this for my husband who is interested in Eastern Europe/Communist style items and culture, and he could not put it down. There were many, many photos of things that he had never seen. It's quite a look into the old world of Communist consumer culture and one can see why it was all doomed to fail. You'll love the old soda machine dispensers. No cans; you got a small cup for your money, than put the cup back in the machine!. James D. Crabtree said Soviet Kitsch. This book is truly fun, looking at what were once common Soviet items and providing humorous stories relating to how they worked (or didn't). Arcade games, communal soda machines, highly dangerous heaters, cigarettes named after slave-labor projects all of these are featured in this small book. If you are an admirer of communism or the old USSR, you are not going to enjoy this book. If you are almost anyone else you'll love it.
Lara Vapnyar is the author of the novel Memoirs of a Muse and a collection of short stories, There Are Jews in My House. Boris Kachka is a journalist and author whose writing has been published in New York Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler, and Russia! Magazine. Vitaly Komar ia a conceptual artist and, together with Alexander Melamid, one of the founders of the Sots Art movement. Michael Idov is a contributing edi
This irreverent survey celebrates the more populist and enduring work in graphic and industrial design that was a product of the Soviet era - a period that remain politically sensitive and under-explored, yet whose influence on the objects and aesthetics of Russian life and thought has been profound. Made in Russia presents fifty such masterpieces, from pioneers of Soviet technology such as the Sputnik, the Buran snowmobile, and the LOMO camera to icons of quotidian culture such as the fishnet shopping bag, the beveled glass, a Cold War-inspired arcade game, and Misha the Olympic bear. Edited by the journalist and author Michael Idov - a Soviet product himself - and including essays from Boris Kachka, Vitaly Komar, Gary Shteyngart, and Lara Vapnyar, the collection explores the provenance of these objects in the forgotten Soviet culture and the unique climate for design from which they could only have emerged.
The book is a collection of delighted insights, personal essays from leading Russian writers such as Gary Shteyngart, and quirky images curated by Idov, who was 15 when the curtain fell." Flaunt"It’s true that Iron Curtain motifs tend to conjure humorless functionality (c.f. With archival photographs and essays by America’s favorite Russians—Komar, Shteyngart, Idov (the editor of the volume)—“Made in Russia” explicates the meaning behind dozens of consumer objects popular in the U.S.S.R.— collapsible drinking cups, electric hair dryers, Sputnik—the pride of the superpower. ‘Iron Curtain’) or high kitsch, but this big-hearted compendium proves that even as the USSR began to disintegrate, it managed, through objects and toys and technologies, to articulate a national sensibility as confounding, elusive, and magical as the Pyramid M