The Improbable Museum: Igor Savitsky's Art Museum in Nukus As an Artifact of Postwar Soviet Reality” by Zukhra Kasimova

H-SHERA Announcement: “The Improbable Museum: Igor Savitsky's Art Museum in Nukus as an Artifact of Postwar Soviet Reality” by Zukhra Kasimova

Discussion published by Aleksandr Turbin on Friday, January 3, 2020 Dear Colleagues,

The Ab Imperio 3/2019 issue contains several texts that might be interesting for network members:

“The Improbable Museum: Igor Savitsky's Art Museum in Nukus as an Artifact of Postwar Soviet Reality” by Zukhra Kasimova (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/743480) and a document publication "Nevozmozhnyi Muzei" v Arkhivnykh Dokumentakh” (“The Improbable Museum” in Archival Documents) (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/743481)

In the “Archive” section Zukhra Kasimova introduces seventy-two documents from several archival collections in Uzbekistan and Russia, shedding light on the first two decades of the existence of the Nukus Museum of Art. Situated in the midst of a desert, Nukus, the capital of the Karakalpak autonomous republic within the Uzbek SSR, became home to the art collection that is considered the second largest collection of Russian modernist art in the world today. The museum was created in 1966 on the initiative of Igor Savitsky – an artist and art collector, who moved from Moscow to Uzbekistan after World War II. The figure of Savitsky and the history of the museum that bears his name today are surrounded by myths, because of the uniqueness of the collection of Russian avant-garde art procured by a Soviet state museum and the scarcity of information about this initiative that was available to scholars until now. These documents, to date mostly unknown to scholars, make it possible for the first time to discuss the substance of Savitsky’s life story and the Nukus museum’s history rather than the myths surrounding them. In her introduction to the documents, Kasimova maps the available sources and identifies additional contexts

Citation: Aleksandr Turbin. Announcement: “The Improbable Museum: Igor Savitsky's Art Museum in Nukus as an Artifact of Postwar Soviet Reality” by Zukhra Kasimova. H-SHERA. 01-03-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/166842/discussions/5671115/announcement-%E2%80%9C-improbable-museum-igor-savitskys-art-muse um-nukus Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-SHERA and stories in need of further research. She offers her interpretation of Savitsky’s mystery by reconstructing the multifaceted historical context involving Karakalpak national autonomy, the Uzbek union republic, and Moscow as both the ultimate arbiter and mediator of regional conflicts. To understand the phenomenon of Savitsky’s museum, Kasimova argues, one needs to see him not as a lonely romantic figure but as a participant simultaneously in several social and cultural networks. A man of hybrid loyalties and identity, he was assisted by people who perceived him as “one of them” – whether a Karakalpak party apparatchik or a Moscow- based artist.

As the story of Savitsky shows, in the imperial situation of overlapping sociocultural contexts, composite identities, and multiple loyalties, conflicts can be converted into a socially constructive force, and the subaltern status – into symbolic (and even financial) capital. Conceptualizing this phenomenon beyond historical observations should be a task of social theory, but this question has not even been formulated so far.

Ab Imperio 3/2019 “The Social Contract: In Theories and in Practices” Table of Contents: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/41546

The present issue 3/2019, “The Social Contract: In Theories and in Practices,” focuses on the constructive effect of conflicts. Conflict resolution implies compromise, so there is nothing unusual in the idea that a stable social arrangement might be the result of a prior confrontation. But, a conflict itself can testify to a high degree of social integration, whether it is contested politics or frequent litigations: systematic nonviolent tensions prove that individuals and groups share a common social space. The very idea of being in conflict with someone implies a common cultural frame of references and institutionalized channels of interaction.

The annual program of the journal:

General information:

Ab Imperio Quarterly is an international humanities and social sciences peer-reviewed journal dedicated to studies in new imperial history and the interdisciplinary and comparative study of nationalism and nationalities in the post-Soviet space. The Journal serves as an international forum for scholars reflecting on historical and contemporary encounters with diversity in composite societies.

See more at https://abimperio.net/