Sample (Soviet) Citations

Image One: "Workers use old-fashioned brooms to gather grain into a large pile for cleaning." Kazhakstan, circa 1950. Photograph.

"Workers use old-fashioned brooms to gather grain into a large pile for cleaning." Marxist Internet Archive. "History Archive." Ed. Brian Basgen. 2001. 20 February 2008. <http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/art/photography/farming/index.htm>.

[headnote (200 words) goes here].

Image Two: Vladimir Malagis. Steel Workers. 1950. Oil on Canvas. 162 cm x 200 cm.

Malagis, Vladimir. Steel Workers. The Marxist Internet Archive. "Painting with the Hand and Eye of Marxism" Ed. Brian Bagsen. 2007. 20 February 2008. <http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/visual_arts/painting/index.htm>.

This painting reveals that socialist realism, the official aesthetic of the communist part, is surprisingly not like a photograph. Socialist Realism was founded in part by Maxim Gorky, who began his work as an abstract expressionist (Yedlin 26). In this image, the most prominant feature is the smoke from the steel factory. The workers, immersed and enveloped in this smoke are also somewhat obscured by it. Yet this image, a prototype of socialist realism, offers some insight into what constituted this seemingly straightforward (and yet far too strict) aesthetic sensibility. Since the workers can hardly be seen as individual figures, emphasis is immediately placed upon the imposing environment of the workplace. One of the central efforts of the Soviet regime during the late 40's and early 50's was to deal with the growing disillusionment of the ideal worker and the failure of many communist ideals. Socialist Realism remained as one of the few channels for promoting such values. Without idealizing labor, Malagis manages nonetheless to depict the human strength necessary to overcome such conditions. This combination of the banal and "beautiful" is perhaps one of socialist realism's defining features--the creation of "poetical and at the same time mundane" art ("Soviet Painting" 1).

(end of sample caption)

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT ESSAY:

• single space captions (so that they can fit on one page)
• include alphabetized works cited page at end (for all works used in all 5 images, not separate works cited pages)
• on the introductory page, please include the references to the HCC reader pages. the easiest format for this would be to make a "List of Images," something like the list of illustrations at the beginning of a book, or a table of contexts. It might look like this (this is a sample):

List of Images

Hannah Hoch. "Untitled." Insert above "Beyond the Bauhaus, painters..." HCC Reader, page 41.

Bertolt Brecht. Kuhle Wampe (film still). Insert after "probed for disturbing truths behind the surface appearances of reality." HCC Reader, page 41.

"Kristallnacht." (photograph). Insert above the paragraph which mentions the "Jewish Problem" and "Night of Broken Glass," HCC Reader, page 87.

....and so on...

Pravda Mtsensk Captions

Image One: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, book cover. Nikolai Leskov.

Citation: Leskov, Nikolai. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. New York: Penguin, 1992 [1865].

A beautiful path in which a man is strolling. This is an image which is presented on the cover of Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk which Shostakovich takes as his inspiration in writing the opera which he feels is the definitive representation of the values of socialism. The portrayal of the lone individual walking down the forest path reflects Shostakovich’s distortion of the figure within the painting suggests the victimization of Lady Macbeth when in reality Lady Macbeth is not a victim but a perpetrator of evil. This is a propagandic move by the publisher of this particular edition. The publisher’s aim in utilizing this image is probably to relate it to the famous opera.

Opposed to the critical and chaotic air of the opera, this cover image shows a reserved, humanistic perspective of the love strife of Katerina and the unleveled structure of the Russian society. Depicted in this painting, we see a lovestricken Sergey traveling on a path of his past. We see details in the painting such as his black outfit which represents his air of mourning. The tall trees that surround the path he walks in represents the immense growth, wisdom, and experience he has attained. The overall calm and serene setting of the portrait emphasizes the accepted truth of the ways of love and life. In comparing the book and the opera, the book takes a more traditional and comprehensive stance of the tragic love story of Katerina and Sergey. The story was written in 18665, which the opera was written about 69 years later.

On the book cover of the 1994 version of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk, a man in a top hat and a suit is walking on a dirt path in a forest. The original play is by Nikolai Leskov in 1934. Around the time of its original publication, the rise of the National Socialist power was coming into view. The original play was banned in the Soviet Union. The cover shows some bias toward the bourgeiosie because of the man who seems out of place in the cover. The man seems to be walking on a never-ending path.

A little while boy stands on a path in what appears to be the season of autumn. This is a cover for the original short story of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk written in 1895 by Nikolai Leskov. This was made into an opera by Shostakovich, and it reveals the coarsest kind of naturalism. The star of the opera and short story, Katerina, was portrayed as a victim of bourgeios society. On the cover, the white young man is amidst the seasonal change of a dying year as Lady Macbeth or Katerina died due to the overwhelming influence of bourgeious society.

The character on the cover would represent Sergey and the isolation he created for himself. Everyone he’s ever loved has died, because he’s pushed everyone away whether he intended to do that or not. This is possibly due to the fact that he’s moving on while everybody else is left in the past. We see this depicted in the cover as the man is walking towards us which symbolizes him walking away from all his problems as moving on from them. The path that he has traveled has encompassed him because of his past. The cover shows a sense of him being sad, as he is walking away alone, dressed in all black and remembering his past; however, it also shows a direction in the next step in his life of moving forward as he is surrounded by all these bright green trees and receiving a fresh breath of air from them.

Ideas Draft: Essay Five

1. Overall Selection—write a good page that describes how you are thinking about your overall selection. Consult the #4 of the “5 on Essay Five” Handout. Please include questions/problems. This can be more brainstorm-y in nature, or you can use it to try and generate some material for the “topic sentence” aspect of each headnote (consult #5 of the “5 on Essay Five” Handout).

2. List for the five images as you are considering:

• links to images or titles of images (whatever even minimal form of citation you have, and please note difficulties you are having with citation).
  
• The passage (with page number) of the HCC Reader that this most closely relates to (it might be several places or a paragraph, so just include where it is most strongly connected.
  
• Aspects/concepts you are considering focusing on in your headnote (i.e. remember the discussion of the Hoch/Brugman photo which included more info on the “new woman” rather than Hoch as a person or her art or her relationship with Brugman—this is the type of choice you will have to make with your image. In other words, think about what you want the image to represent).

3. For two of your images, include rough drafts of your headnotes/captions. Experiment with the rough draft—it might help you to write more and have your peers and I read it and make suggestions about what is necessary. It might help you to write out the 6 C’s more formally (i.e. to do the chart for each image). Whatever you decide, this part of the process should help you to generate material (i.e. things to say) about the images. If you are not formally using the 6 C’s (content, citation, context, connections, communication, conclusions), remember that they should be “intimately involved” in your headnote writing, but that they should also not simply be listed, and should be included as you see fit in the headnote. Read over the information on Primary Sources, #1 of “5 on Essay Five” Handout, the Writer’s Handbook (112-115), and the information on Professor Moeller’s website on primary sources. This will help you determine what is fit to print.

*******Email this to me and to your peer group by 12 midnight Sunday, February 10. Due to the fact that I will not have easy access to a computer, it is absolutely necessary that I receive the email by the deadline. Please try to cut and paste in the email rather than sending as an attachment. I realize certain typographical details won’t transfer, but I’ll be aware of this. Please print out your peers’ email drafts and spend some time reading them, making helpful comments or questions, before the peer conference on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Schedule of conferences (Location: Cyber-A Cafe)--please be considering which time works for you (these will be done in groups of three or four):
Tuesday February 12
11:00-12:00
12:00-1:00
1:00-2:00
2:00-3:00

Wednesday February 13
10:00-11:00
12:00-1:00

Sample Caption II: Schwitters

Kurt Schwitters, Mz 299, 1921 By Encyclopedia Britannica Soon after World War I, Kurt Schwitters was attracted by the emerging Dada school, a nihilistic literary and artistic movement dedicated to the destruction of existing aesthetic values. Denied membership in the Berlin circle of Dadaists, he formed his own variant in Hannover. He began to create compositions assembled from various everyday objects (train tickets, wooden spools, newspaper, string, cigarettes, and postage stamps). Similarly, his poems were composites of newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and other printed ephemera. He referred to all of his artistic activities as Merz, a nonsense word derived from the second syllable of the word Kommerz (German: “commerce”). His collages were called Merzbilden (“Merz pictures”). Later, he also referred to all of his daily activities and even to himself by that name. In 1937, when the German government declared Schwitters' art decadent, he moved to Norway. With the German invasion of Norway in 1940, however, Schwitters was forced to escape to England. The 'Mz' in the title of this work stands for 'Merz' and is followed by a number to denote that it is the 299th collage of the series. Schwitters produced around 2000 collages during his life, using coloured and printed papers with a variety of textures. His inclusion of fragments of paper, which have text on them, is reminiscent of cubist works, which feature scraps of newspaper. Schwitters's collages of 1920 to 1922 frequently employ a 'radiating' format, with diagonally pasted papers fanning out from the bottom centre. (words: 243)

Image Details: * Accession no. GMA 4081 * Medium Collage on paper * Size 18.00 x 14.50 cm (including mount: 20.00 x 16.00 cm) * Copyright © DACS 2006 * Credit Bequeathed by Gabrielle Keiller 1995 * Subjects [1] Dada www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/online_a

Comment on the above caption. What would you add or take out? What type of information is focused on in the sample? What would you do differently?

Sample Caption I: Hoch

Höch and Til Brugman, her partner from 1926 to 1935
Photograph: Black & White
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/~rmoeller/HCC_Lectures/RGM_Lecture2.html

In the 1920s, the Weimar Republic, named for the town in central Germany where a new German constitution was drafted in 1919, became known throughout Europe for its encouragement of all sorts of experimentation—musical, artistic, even sexual. Although a global phenomenon, the “new woman,” characterized by her short hair cut, her androgynous dress, and her independence seemed to be particularly at home in the Weimar Republic. Particularly, in big cities like Berlin, Weimar opened up a space in which it was possible for women to enjoy same-sex relations with women in public spaces. In her 1929 book, Else Hermann described What the New Woman Is Like. Although this vision of the “new woman” was well beyond the reach of many urban working-class women and posed a threat to more traditional women of all classes, Hermann suggests some of the ways in which conceptions of appropriate femininity were subject to redefinition in the Weimar years. One such, “new woman” was Hannah Höch, a part of the Berlin Dadaist movement. In the 1920s in Germany, explicitly political art was almost exclusively produced by men and offered depictions of women that clearly reflected a male perspective. Women typically appeared as the downtrodden victims of the capitalist system, forced into poverty and unwanted pregnancy, or as prostitutes, slaves in a different way to the capitalist system. Höch was exceptional not only because she was a woman in an artistic world dominated by men, but also because she offered a much more nuanced commentary on the status of women in the Weimar Republic. (words: 258)



Reprinted in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 206-7.

Comment on the above caption. What would you add or take out? What type of information is focused on in the sample? What would you do differently?