Documentary Aesthetics in the Long 1960s in Eastern Europe and Beyond

Clemens Günther, Ph.D, Freie Universität Berlin, is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for East European Studies. His research interests comprise the late and post-Soviet historical novel, the cultural history of cybernetics, climate fiction, and the ecological poetics of Russian realism. Matthias Schwartz, Ph.D, is co-head of the program area World Literature at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin, Germany. His research interests include Eastern European socialist and post-socialist literatures, memory cultures, and popular cultures in a comparative perspective.

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Notes on Contributors



Introduction

Firsthand Time

 Clemens Günther and Matthias Schwartz



Part 1: Exposing a Painful Past: Modes of Testimony

1 “Document of the Soul:” Varlam Shalamov’s Documentary Writing in a Contemporary Context

 Franziska Thun-Hohenstein



2 A Dreyfus Affair for Soviet Children: on the Encoded Poetics of Aleksandra Brushtein’s Documentary Prose

 Natasha Gordinsky



3 Supplementing Evidence: Danilo Kiš’s Poet(h)ics in the Context of Yugoslav Documentarism of the 1960s

 Tatjana Petzer



4 Hands of Time and Large Numbers in Alexander Kluge’s (Post-)Documentary Literature

 Gunther Martens



Part 2: Discovering the Self and the Other: Modes of Expressing Individuality

5 Celebration and Abstraction: the Documentary Mode of Jonas Mekas’s Diary Films

 Christian Zehnder



6 Documentary and Poetics Interwoven: Mikhail Kalik’s Cinema

 Elena Nekrasova



7 The Technique of Documenting: on the Early Reportages of Ryszard Kapuściński and Hanna Krall

 Matthias Schwartz



Part 3: Refining the Senses: Modes of Self-Reflective Artistic Practices

8 “Dramas of the Fact:” Soviet Conceptualisations of Documentary Theatre in the 1960s

 Anna Hodel



9 “Instead of Approximate Precision—Precise Approximation:” Ian Satunovskii’s Poor Poetry

 Georg Witte



10 Reproductions without an Original: the Self-Published Aesthetics of Cold War-Era Copies

 Sarah A. Burgos



Part 4: Exploring the Everyday: Modes of Perceiving Social Issues

11 The Trials of Documenting: Frida Vigdorova’s Notes of the Brodsky Court Proceedings

 Anja Tippner



12 The Poetry of Mikhail Sokovnin: an Aesthetic Opposition to the “Literature of Fact”

 Ilya Kukulin



13 “Discourses of Sobriety:” Documentary Aesthetics in Conceptual Art in the United States

 Renate Wöhrer



Index