Viktor Misiano’s lecture focuses on the reawakening of interest in the mytical and revolutionary ideas of the Russian Cosmists in the work of leading Russian artists of the post-communist era: Dmitri Gutov, Yuri Liederman and Sergei Shutov. In particular, he examines the influence of the founder of Cosmism, Nikolai Fyodorov, who believed that modern science would soon bring about he resurrection of everyone who had ever lived and the colonization of other planets. Although Cosmism influenced the development of the Soviet space programme, its ideas were thoroughly suppressed under Stalin.

Misiano is one of the leading curators and critics of the Russian contemporary art scene. He is editor of ‘Progressive Nostalgia: Contemporary Art of the Former USSR’ (2008), a book that documents a number of international exhibitions he curated in recent years on how artists have responded to enormous social change in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“Byt” is Russian for everyday life. Dr Susan E. Reid of the Russian and Slavonic Studies Department, the University of Sheffield, will talk about Russian domestic life during the 50s and 60s.

The Khrushchev era in the Soviet Union (mid-1950s - mid-1960s) was a time of rapid modernization and intensive industrialized construction of standard mass housing for the Soviet people. The provision of new flats was accompanied by large quantities of advice about how to furnish, decorate and dwell in them in ways that were deemed modern, tasteful and socialist, such that the new apartments would not become nests of ‘petit-bourgeois’ private values but, rather, become the springboard for the final transition to full Communism. This illustrated talk will look at the way in which Soviet citizens who moved into new flats in the early 1960s negotiated standardization, shortages, and modernist taste prescriptions to make these standard spaces into home.