Note on Abbreviations, Transliteration, and Translations
Introduction: How Did It Begin?
Chapter 1. Province of Universality: David Kaufman before
the War (1896–1914)
Chapter 2. Social Immortality: David Kaufman at the
Psychoneurological Institute (1914–16)
Chapter 3. The Beating Pulse of Living Life: Musical,
Futurist, Nonfiction, and Marxist Matrices (1916–18)
Chapter 4. Christ among the Herdsmen: From Refugee to
Propagandist (1918–22)
Acknowledgments
Film Archives Consulted
Filmography
Bibliography
Index
John MacKayis Professor of Film and Media Studies and Professor and Chair of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He received a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale in 1998 and a BA in English from the University of British Columbia in 1987.
Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement:
“What do the revolutionary ambitions of the early twentieth century
– the first “media age” – have in common with the present? This
questions runs through the first volume of John Mackay’s
magisterial Dziga Vertov: Life and Work.”
“Mackay’s long-anticipated book is the first in what will be a
definitive three-volume Life and Works […] The uniqueness of
Mackay’s project is twofold.”
“Mackay and his publisher should be congratulated for the rare
luxury of scale that allows this exploration of the context of
“revolution” and the particular conditions that formed the
revolutionary self in early twentieth-century Europe. Mackay
reveals Vertov as both particular and emblematic. This biography of
an individual becomes a history of a generation, as the writing
zooms in and out, seeking to “understand the historical milieux
that acted upon” Vertov.”
“The depth of research that lies behind each of these stories is
remarkable, and – for the relaxed reader – the book offers a
fascinating journey through the turbulent spaces and communities of
early twentieth-century Russia.”
“He [Mackay] is deeply invested in the ideological contours of
Vertov’s project, in the fate of left-wing though in the twentieth
century, and its relevance for the future. His forensic gaze on the
heterogeneous and complex era that shaped Vertov reveals its
“wrenching confrontations of utopian possibility with violent
closure, radical hope with radical fear”.”
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