Please join us for a talk with Professor Nina Gurianova (Northwestern University).
Elena Guro belonged to the same unique and exciting era of Russian culture—the Silver Age—as artists Marianne von Werefkin (1860-1938), Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962), Olga Rozanova (1886-1918), and their younger contemporary poet Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941). Guro was among the most radical representatives of a new generation of women: boldly independent both in her personal life and in her literary and visual works. Though Guro had short-lived career, she had an immense effect on those around her. Like Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922), who during his lifetime was being called “a poet’s poet,” Elena Guro’s contemporaries considered her “a painter’s painter.”
Guro’s literary debut came in 1905. From then on, her art consisted of two inseparable currents—literary and visual—which reflected the vital concern of early twentieth-century painters and poets with synthesis of arts. From the period of 1909 until her death in 1913, Guro published and designed three collections of prose, poetry and plays: Hurdy-Gurdy (Sharmanka, 1909), Autumn Dream (Osennii son, 1912), and Celestial Baby Camels (Nebesnye verbliuzhata, 1914).
Nina Gurianova teaches at the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. Her scholarship in the fields of literature and art history encompasses both Russian and European modernist and avant-garde movements, with a specific emphasis on the interrelation of aesthetics and politics. She has authored and edited six books on the Russian avant-garde and published extensively in Europe, the United States and Russia. Gurianova served as the primary exhibition consultant for the Guggenheim Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and participated in the organization of many exhibitions. Gurianova’s most recent book, The Aesthetics of Anarchy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) has won AATSEEL Best Book in Literary/Cultural Studies annual award. Her research was supported by Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern, the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, William F. Milton Fund, IREX, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for Humanities. Currently she is working on a monograph Tales and Visions: Discovering Elena Guro, which explores in depth the themes outlined in her presentation.
Images: Elena Guro's portrait, and Guro's illustration to her own collection of poems and prose "Celestial Baby Camels" ("Небесные верблюжата").
