Hand at work. The poetics of handcraftedness in the Russian avant-garde

The formula of art as a new vision was nominated by an art avant -garde and since then has become a common place among future generations of art historians, literary scholars and cultural scientists. Meanwhile, the large -scale cloud of meanings in the culture of modernity is associated with the concepts of arm and gesture. Suzanne Strater"s book addresses the multifaceted problem of tactile interactions between man and a work of art and opens the reader with an avant -garde layer, concentrated around the concepts of "manual" and "man -made". Separate chapters are devoted to gestures of touch, transfer, instructions, letters, work, bringing us closer to the new understanding of the avant -garde as the era of close plexus of a visual dominant with experience of bodily contact. As a result, the book not only compensates for the limited, “eye” perception of the avant -garde, but also fixes the process of transition from optococentrism towards increasing the role of tactile perception in humanitarian knowledge.
Suzanne Shtratling - Doctor of Sciences, Professor of the Free University of Berlin, Specialist in Eastern Slavic literature