The Red Atlantis: (Culture and the Moving Image)

For most of the twentieth century, American and European intellectual life was defined by its fascination with a particular utopian vision. Both the artistic and political vanguards were spellbound by the Communist promise of a new human era -- so much so that its political terrors were rationalized as a form of applied evolution and its collapse hailed as the end of history. The Red Atlantis argues that Communism produced a complex culture with a dialectical relation to both modernism and itself. Offering examples ranging from the Stalinist show trial to Franz Kafka's posthumous career as a dissident writer and the work of filmmakers, painters, and writers, which can be understood only as criticism of existing socialism made from within, The Red Atlantis suggests that Communism was an aesthetic project -- perhaps the aesthetic project of the twentieth century. Considering the meaning of Communist culture in its absence, these essays sift through the wrecking age of Marxist fantasy to exhibit exhumed fossils (Socialist Realist canvases), vanished monuments (the Berlin Wall), imaginary territories (the Jewish state, Birobidzhan), and ideological memories (the Crime of the Century). The Cold War notwithstanding, the greatest of these exotic artifacts and obsolete scenarios is the lost Communist utopia, which, in fact, never existed.

Table of Contents:
CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction: Missing...The Berlin Wall Chapter 1: "I Saw Stalin Once When I Was a Child": Socialist Realism, the Last Ism Chapter 2: Realist Socialism: Documenting the Undocumentable Chapter 3: Beyond the Pale: Soviet Jews and Soviet Jewish Cinema Chapter 4: Who Was Victor Serge (and Why Will We Have to Ask)? Chapter 5: Life in Czechoslovakia, or a Cage in Search of a Bird Chapter 6: A History of Communism in Twenty-four Scenarios Chapter 7: My Nuclear Family Notes Index

About the Author :
J. Hoberman is a staff writer for the Village Voice and Adjunct Professor of Cinema, the Cooper Union.

Review :
"These essays, at once funny and heartbreaking, survey the work of Soviet and Eastern European artists, writers, and filmmakers. Hoberman is an expert gifted with high intellectual spirits, but he doesn't take cheap shots: he never lets us forget the pressures and dangers that affected even the most devoted Communists under Communism." oNew Yorker "Zooming back and forth from Berlin to Moscow to the Lower East Side, J. Hoberman has compiled the best evocation of the lost world of Jewish communism since the historian Raphael Samuel's memoir of working-class East London in New Left Review." oThe Lingua Franca Book Review "In J. Hoberman, the ruins of communist culture have found a passionate and erudite archeologist. A collection of essays on communist art, film, and literature, The Red Atlantis is an elegy for the 'Communist utopia which, in fact, never existed.'" oDissent "This is a superb collection of essaysodeft, penetrating, erudite, witty and altogether a pleasure to read." oWashington Post "Provocative, insightful, funny, J. Hoberman's The Red Atlantis explains howowith Philistines generally in chargeoCommunism, in contrast always to anti-Communism, managed to encourage some of the most interesting, most Jewish, and silliest art of the century." oPaul Buhle, co-author of Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist "Intelligently stitched together from Hoberman's many reviews, this volume introduces readers to the lost continent of communist culture...Well documented and written with enviable verve, this provocative book should reopen old debates and spark useful reevaluations of the countless compromised masterpieces produced by well-meaning but ultimately misguided intellectuals over more than 70 turbulent years." oChoice