(Ebook) Imagining the Unimaginable: World War, Modern Art, and the Politics of Public Culture in Russia, 1914-1917 by Aaron J. Cohen ISBN 9780803215474, 0803215479

(Ebook) Imagining the Unimaginable: World War, Modern Art, and the Politics of Public Culture in Russia, 1914-1917 by Aaron J. Cohen ISBN 9780803215474, 0803215479

I believe that a broader, less determined concept of “public culture” can help us better explore the links between politics and culture in wartime Imperial Russia. In this context, a public is not a specific group of people or institutions but a “relation among strangers” self-organized through discourse; it is created by people who seek to address an indefinite and impersonal audience outside themselves.23 Public culture is the institutional and ideological nexus that structures the real and imaginary space between individuals and public inside modern society; it consists of the institutions, ideas, and customs people use to perceive the world, communicate with others, and act outside the immediate environment of faceto-face communication and action. Modern states with socially heterogeneous and large, anonymous populations have an overarching public culture that is usually bounded by language, law, and media institutions: pluralist publics include many audiences, public ideas, and centers of cultural production, while authoritarian or totalitarian publics contain fewer available audiences, more limits on public ideas, and stronger central institutions.--