Nataliya Zlydneva

My research aims to study communication models of the visual arts that reflect the socio-historical atmosphere of the dramatic events of the 20th century and partly moderate them. The project intends to answer the questions how visual arts reflected the traumatic experience of  World War I and the Revolution as well as how visual arts anticipated the advent of Stalinist totalitarianism. Various forms of the representation of political power in visual arts will be discussed, along with their archaic roots. On the basis of a comparative and typological analysis of iconography, compositional schemes, visual semantics, stylistic models of painting and sculpture, a "lexicon" of visual "texts" will be constructed, revealing its specific rhetoric. The research will examine artefacts made by eminent as well as some lesser-known Russian painters of the late avant-garde (1920–1930) in a broad international context. The formal-semantic analysis of artefacts will be supplemented by the biographical survey of the artists, many of whom became victims of Stalinist repressions. My study is based on the traditions of Russian semiotics (Moscow-Tartu semiotic school), as well as European schools of visual semiotics, sociology of art  and cultural studies. The project will expand, deepen and further process the range of problems discussed in my previous works. With the support of research in libraries and museums in Budapest, consultations with colleagues from CEU and other scholarly institutions in Central Europe, new aspects of the research questions outlined above will be proposed, their range will  be expanded, and the methodological base of the research project will be updated.