Arts & Ideas25 Feb 2016

Free Thinking – Russian Culture Inwards and Outwards

Anne McElvoy investigates the role of culture within historic Soviet expansionism and current Russian geopolitics. She talks to Charles Clover, author of Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism about Eurasianism, an old idea with considerable traction in Putin's Russia and why bad ideas tend to win out over good ones .

Historian Polly Jones, author of Myth Memory Trauma: Rethinking the Soviet past, 1953-70 and Clem Cecil, in-coming Director of Pushkin House, are in the studio to discuss the extent of Soviet interest in soft power alongside Mark Nash, curator of Red Africa and Ian Christie, co-curator of Unexpected Eisenstein, two new exhibitions in London.

The continuing cultural legacy of Cold War relations between the Soviet Union and Africa is the subject of Red Africa, a season of film, art exhibition, talks and events, runs at Calvert 22 in London while at the same time Unexpected Eisenstein, a new exhibition at GRAD gallery in London, tells the story of the anglophile tendencies of a the great Soviet film-maker, Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein, whose epic and patriotic films Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, together constitute a visual retrospective of Russian power, was himself hugely influenced by British writers from Shakespeare to Dickins. But as Anne McElvoy hears, the director went on to influence generations of British artists and film-makers, one legacy of his six-week sojourn in London in 1929. It was, as Christie explains, a trip ordered but not precisely sponsored, by Stalin.

Producer: Jacqueline Smith

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(2000)

Wealth

Anne McElvoy and guests discuss the concentration, distribution and morality of wealth now and look back at An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published by the Scottish ec...

5 Juni 56min

Free Thinking at the Hay Festival: Responsibility

Freedom is one of the leading values of our society. But with freedom comes responsibility, which is a much more contested principle. Deciding where responsibility lies, and what it means to take it, ...

29 Maj 56min

Thinking with Food

The links between food and philosophy, ideas about experimentation, taste and how food and traditions become part of our identity are explored by Matthew Sweet in Radio 4's round-table discussion prog...

22 Maj 56min

Technologies of the Self

‘Technologies of the self’ is a phrase from the French philosopher Michel Foucault to describe things people might do to shape the people they are, like dieting, exercise, journaling, or in an earlier...

15 Maj 57min

The Middle

From taking the middle ground to the mid-life crisis, Middle England to middle managers, to being a middle child - is occupying a position in the middle out of fashion?Anne McElvoy hosts Radio 4's ide...

8 Maj 57min

Weapons, real and symbolic

How do weapons exert real and symbolic power, both now and in history?Joining Matthew Sweet in Radio 4's round table discussion programme about ideas are:The former soldier and politician Tobias Ellwo...

1 Maj 56min

Weapons, real and symbolic

How do weapons exert real and symbolic power, both now and in history?Joining Matthew Sweet are:The former soldier and politician Tobias EllwoodThe sculptor Hew Locke, whose artworks exploring colonia...

1 Maj 56min

Purity

From spiritual cleanliness to purity spirals: Matthew Sweet is joined by guests including David Aaronovitch; Catherine Coldstream, author of Cloistered – My Years as a Nun; Linda Woodhead, Professor o...

24 Apr 56min