Sergei Tretyakov - Leach, Robert

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Résumé :
Sergei Tretyakov is one of those artists and intellectuals from the first half of the twentieth century whose name is known, but whose achievements are barely recognized. He seems curiously elusive. Who exactly was he? What did he do? A victim of Stalin's Great Terror, declared an 'enemy of the people', his works were 'disappeared' and his name forbidden to be mentioned. But he was at the very heart of avant-garde modernism. He collaborated with Sergei Eisenstein both in the theatre and on films, and was behind Eisenstein's formative theory of 'the montage of attractions'. He was one of Vladimir Mayakovsky's most intimate associates. He was a crucial influence in the formulation of Vsevolod Meyerhold's biomechanics and of Bertolt Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, and he was a potent force behind Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. His influence grew from the astonishing range of his intellectual and artistic work. He was a distinguished poet and playwright, and a formidable cultural theorist. He played the piano with skill, precision and feeling, he could draw cartoons good enough to be reproduced in newspapers, he became one of Russia's foremost radio broadcasters, and he was an outstanding photographer. At the same time, he was a warm and affectionate husband and father, a bold, argumentative and charismatic friend, and a shrewd observer of revolutionary Russia's hopes and struggles. This book uncovers the multifarious facets of this fascinating artist and thinker, sets his ideas in the context of his time and for the first time reveals the significance of his diverse achievements....

Biographie:
Robert Leach is an academic, a writer and a freelance theatre director. He has a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, and has been Reader in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham and Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Edinburgh University. His professional theatre work has included acting in the USA and directing in Moscow, where he staged the Russian premiere of I Want a Baby in 1990.He has written over a dozen books on the theatre, including Revolutionary Theatre (Routledge 1994) and Russian Futurist Theatre: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and he co-edited with Victor Borovsky A History of Russian Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 1999). He is also a poet, and five collections of his poetry have been published. He has specialised in the work of Sergei Tretyakov, whose daughter, Tatyana Tretyakova, he worked with. A volume of Sergei Tretyakov's plays, I Want a Baby and Other Plays, in his and Stephen Holland's English translation, is also available from Glagoslav.