Red Migrations

Together with a new political, social, and cultural order, the Bolshevik Revolution also brought about a spatial revolution. Changed patterns, motivations, and impacts of migration collided with new cultural forms and aesthetic mandates. Red Migrations highlights the various multidirectional and multilateral transnational movements of leftist thinkers, artists, and writers.

The book draws on avant-garde poets such as David Burliuk, Marxist theoreticians such as János Mácza, and “fellow travellers” such as Langston Hughes, revealing how leftists of all stripes were inspired and at times impelled by the Soviet Revolution to cross borders. It explores how the resulting circulation of ideas, aesthetic forms, and individuals not only contributed enormously to the ferment of creative activity in the early Soviet years, but also deeply informed international leftist aesthetics and political practice throughout the twentieth century.

The robust and diverse transnational networks created by these circulations are at the centre of this volume. With original archival research and insightful analyses, Red Migrations sheds light on the ideals, aspirations, and disappointments of leftist transnationalism from the 1920s through the 1960s and the aesthetic forms they engendered.