William Morris, a Transcultural Artist and Man of Letters

William Morris is extremely famous for his career as a designer and one of the founders of the whole movement of the Arts and Crafts in Late Victorian England. But the other side of his career, as a man of letters, is far less abundantly documented. While his Socialist utopia News from Nowhere (1890) is still read and commented upon today, far less attention has been given to his early poems, as well as his late romances written in a mock- mediaeval style which was to inspire the whole twentieth-century movement of “Fantasy” literature.The article focuses on Morris’s partly neglected love of letters, both in the sense of literature as a whole, and of individual letters. Morris loved the letter as a writer, but also as a visual artist: from an early stage of his career, he practiced calligraphy as leisure, before turning to book-printing as a professional activity in the last years of his life. This love of letters is studied on the basis of a particular case-study: his production of a calligraphic and illustrated version of the mediaeval Persian poems of Omar Khayyam, the Rubbayiat, in their English translation by Edward FitzGerald (1859). Aside from his passion for letters, in both their graphic and poetic dimension, Morris’s work on the Rubbayiat shows how deeply intercultural and intermedial his inspiration was. He recreated for the English readers of the Persian poet a visual world which borrowed from his other creations in the field of textiles, carpets, wall-papers, etc., and brought together East and West in a completely hybrid visual creation. It is those eminently cross-cultural and trans-disciplinary sources of inspiration that the article unravels.

FACTORS OF IMAGINATIVE AND SEMANTIC INVERSION OF ARCHETYPAL STRUCTURES OF CONSCIOUSNESS HUMAN AND OF THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE METHOD AND STYLE OF SOCREALISM

Thіs article is an attempt to highlight the factors of formation in art of the method and style of total socialrealism as a method of substitution. The basic factors are the contradictions of the consciousness of the Russian ethnos, which are due to the inability of semantic essential distinction of the main oppositional categories of existence. The historical organicity of the Russian mentality in the socialist and communist forms of existence has revealed, as well as the historical organicity of the method of substitutions in the construction of antagonistic models of worldview. This method of substitution will become basic in the style of socialist realism. Certain figurative and semantic inversions of archetypal structures of human consciousness and the environment of the period of Soviet totalitarianism are revealed and characterized: eschatological dimension of Eternity / time category of bright future; the truth / the untruth; sacred (theological) / profane; relative / absolute; spiritual / material; the hero / the anti-hero; destruction of the past / future; existence in spirit / existence in political ideology. These substitutions led to the development of certain unified iconographic schemes in art and, in particular, in architecture: residential complexes (communities), giant pedestal buildings (sculpture building), a step-increasing volume of public buildings like to the temple. Forcible change of the picture of the world generates hyper-reality, where is desired seems real. The violent change of consciousness of nations in the Soviet Union, built on the principles of antagonistic dual models of worldview with their moral and semantic indistinguishability, could not give rise to projects of utopias as projects of evolution. The inversion of archetypal structures in socialist utopia is essentially anti-utopian.

Max Weber

Why would you deny that Max Weber is the foremost social scientist ever? His range and scope is larger and deeper than that of Marx and Durkheim or Schumpeter. He had clear microfoundation and rejected socialist utopia.

The Socialist Bratwurst: East German Urbanism and Its Reemergence in the Present

This article examines defining features of East German urban planning—primarily the housing complex and the city/settlement binary—and their relationship to Eisenhüttenstadt, a city founded in 1950 as Stalinstadt, an East German socialist utopia. Today Eisenhüttenstadt is home to a novel form of urban renewal in which architects and planners look to the socialist past for inspiration as they imagine a new urban future. I examine the history of socialist urbanism as it was implemented in Eisenhüttenstadt, as well as how residents and urban planners came to understand socialist urbanism in the years immediately following German reunification. I then examine an urban renewal program, started in 2014, that explicitly draws on the socialist past. In doing so, I aim to consider the socialist city not as an architectural form but as a set of practices, spatial imaginations, and ethical commitments that can be reanimated even in a capitalist sociopolitical context.

Безусловен базов доход: поредната социалистическа утопия?

The Universal Basic Income: Another Socialist Utopia? The concept of universal basic income (UBI) is presented as a tool for reducing poverty through guaranteed financial transfer by the state to each individual. The financial transfer, or UBI, allows a person to cover their minimum expenses. The idea is rooted in the 19th century and has gained popularity again in the last decade as a result of individuals and societies expecting a loss of labor opportunities due to digitalization, automation and technological progress in AI development. In this paper we address problems of economic policy in the case that UBI is introduced in Europe. We address fundamental questions that require answers before the concept is regarded as an applicable alternative to existing social systems. We consider the concept as another socialist utopia that cannot be implemented in existing economic systems in Europe. Only in case of a total system transformation can it be a viable alternative.

Opera for the Revolution

Chapter 4 is the first of three chapters on “revolutionary operas.” Five operas were created between 1971 and 1973. These reflect the state ideology of juche, often translated as “self-reliance,” but linked, in artistic creation, to two control strategies that keep cultural production in check: collective composition and “seed theory.” The operas enhance the cult of Kim Il Sung and were created with the assistance of Kim Jong Il. After a detailed consideration and contextualization of juche (“self reliance”), the operas are introduced. The chapter presents two in detail, “Sea of Blood” and “The Flower Girl,” to explore how lyrics, music, and drama reference historical and social issues known to North Korean audiences to strengthen the orthodox history of the North Korean state, the leadership cult, and the notion of a socialist utopia. It also introduces the three additional operas, “A True Daughter of the Party,” “Oh! Tell, the Forest,” and “Mount Kŭmgang.”

Songs for "Great Leaders"

North Korea is often said to be unknown: a reclusive and secretive state. It behaves as if the whole country is a theater that projects itself through performance. Song, together with other music and dance production, forms the soundtrack to the theater of daily life, embedding messages that tell the official history, the exploits of leaders, and the socialist utopia yet-to-come. Songs form the foundation stones of revolutionary operas, of instrumental and orchestral tone poems, and are rearranged in countless versions for use by children in kindergartens, for 50,000 young people who dance annually in celebration of the Eternal President’s birthday, and for the up to 100,000 participants of mass performance spectacles such as the Arirang Festival. North Koreans are reminded daily on state-controlled television news how their songs are beamed around the world by satellite, and songs are today routinely uploaded to YouTube and Youku. This is the first book-length account of North Korean music and dance in any language other than Korean. It is based on fieldwork, interviews, and resources researched in private and public archives and libraries in North Korea, but also in South Korea, China, North America, and Europe. It explores revolutionary songs written in the 1940s and pop songs from the 2010s, exploring in a critical but informed way not just songs, but also developments of Korean musical instruments, the creation of revolutionary operas that embed the state’s ideology of juche (self-reliance), mass performance spectacles, dance and dance notation, and composers and compositions.