This book has been a collective project: its ideas, structure, and development were established through the dialogue with its authors. Almost all of the authors, besides contributing a unique piece of text or artwork, were sharing their critique, knowledge, and contacts. We are grateful to every single artist and theorist whose name you can see in the table of contents for the opportunity to work in continuous dialogue with them.
We would like to express our particular gratitude to Emilia Kabakov: her kind support and advice were very helpful throughout the whole journey from the initial idea to submitting the manuscript. Arseny Zhilyaev has supported us since we first discussed the idea of publishing an anthology of art writing from Russia, and he was our committed colleague, supporter and collaborator throughout the development of the project. We are grateful to the the late Dmitry Prigov’s family – Nadejda Bourova and Andrey Prigov, who, with the help of Professor Mark Leiderman, provided lesser-known texts by Dmitry Prigov.
Very important for us was support from Kosmos Foundation, received at the crucially important stage of the production of this book. We would like to say thank you to Aliya Prokofyeva, the president of the Kosmos Foundation.
The co-editors of this book met in Goldsmiths College, University of London, and the initial development of it started with the support of Goldsmiths. We would like to thank Dr Simon Sheikh, Dr Helena Reckitt, Dr Ele Carpenter, Kirsty Ogg, and Chris Hammond for their critique and advice and Dr Gilda Williams for generously sharing her outstanding experience in writing and publishing.
We would also like to say thank you to Kika Sroka-Miller, Dominic Fagan, and all the Zed Books team – and Joseph Choonara who put us in touch. Zed Books is a unique publishing collective that takes egalitarian, nonhierarchical, and nonconsumerist ethics of labor as a principle for organizing their work, which we found fitted very well to the book we assembled. Zed Books’ attentive exploration of the world’s diversity of histories, philosophies, and politics puts our work in an appropriate context.
The book’s chapters that needed translation from Russian were translated by Andrew Bromfield; his accurate, nuanced and elegant way of treating languages made our mutual work highly enjoyable.
Many authors of this book are regular contributors to the Moscow Art Magazine, established and led for many years by Viktor Misiano. The magazine has been the major source of contemporary art writing in Russia which we looked at in our research. We have also looked at Former West publications for inspiration.
We would like to thank Elena Walker who generously shared her experience and who provided us with some useful contacts and information. We would like to express gratitude to Professor Averil Mansfield-Bradley for her kind and atentive support.
Both of us are grateful to our families and friends who provided help unconditionally when it was needed.
Alex sends her love to Galina Anikina and Alexander Anikin for their unwavering support and affection, and to Katya Savchenko for the gift of her friendship and invaluable advice on the matters of life and work.
Elena would like to express gratitude to Russell Bradley, who voluntarily spent hours and days helping with the editing that contributed to the clarity and rigor of thought we hope we have achieved in our work. And, special thanks to Alexander Bradley for his attentive interest and for treating this work with a sense of its importance.
Elena Zaytseva and Alex Anikina