Between Knowledge Utopia and Archive. The “Encyclopedia of Artistic Terminology” Project at the State Academy of Artistic Research in Moscow (1921-1930). Unlocking New Sources

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Nikolaj Plotnikov
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; History of Philosophy
• Term: since 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 386757512

The project focuses on the activities at the Moscow State Academy of Artistic Research (GAKhN) to create the "Encyclopedia of Artistic Terminology" (1922-1929), an innovative task to unite the terminology of art, philosophy, and art studies. The work on the encyclopedia, headed by the philosopher Gustav Shpet, was left unfinished after the dissolution of the Academy for ideological reasons in 1929. Recently, new documents were discovered in the Manuscript Department of the Russian State Li-brary in Moscow and proved to be essential to our knowledge of the GAKhN’s most ambitious intellec-tual project, its encyclopedia. Already collected and scanned, they reveal, first of all, the development of artistic-aesthetic concepts that scholars wanted to elaborate on to remap the entire field of art knowledge (spatial arts, music, theatre, literature, production art, and design). Secondly, these docu-ments show how the elaboration of aesthetic terminology and the creation of new orders of knowledge were interwoven with the cultural initiatives of the early Soviet Union such as cultural diplomacy, exhibition organization, rearrangements of museum displays, and educational projects in applied art and design. New archival findings will allow us to situate the Encyclopedia project within European intellectual history. For this, the project will analyze and present the GAKhN’s Encyclopedia project as an important intellectual and cultural hub, where the interconnections between art and exact knowledge became as clearly visible as the break with the terminological framework of the previous psychological and normative aesthetics. In the project, we will index, study, contextualize, and provide bio-bibliographical information on the new materials and make them accessible in a representative selection. Together with an in-depth study of overarching theoretical and empirical elements in the GAKhN’s encyclopedic project, we want to elaborate and publish several papers that exemplify its impact on knowledge production, cultural diplomacy, and fashion in Soviet Russia.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants