Published in Prague some twenty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Tomáš Glanc’s The Russian Archipelago: Icons of Post-Soviet Culture is an idiosyncratic but highly readable and far-reaching survey of Russian cultural space from 1990 to 2010. The book proceeds from a 45-page contextualizing introduction and a brief explanation of (and apologia for) its unconventional format to a series of seventeen portraits of individual artists who have “distinctively influenced” Russian culture of the past two decades.

Cristina Vatulescu’s book, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times, deals with the aestheticization of politics and the intersection between Soviet secret police practices and artistic production. The book takes its impetus from the archival turn following the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. Attempting to unearth the secrets of the communist years people in Eastern Europe have turned to archives in search for truth about the past, betraying “an enduring belief in the authority of their holdings”(13). In response to this phenomenon, Vatulescu, a professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, set out to investigate how these files should be read. She focuses on the secret police personal file as a source of immense influence on the self-perception and representation of the Soviet subject. Wary of reading these files as repositories of truth, Vatulescu wants to analyze their structure and rhetoric to glean the strategies that defined the activities of the secret police.

Following the exhibitions Awkward Objects (Warsaw, 2009) and Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972 (Brussels, Los Angeles, New York, 2011-2012) the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw published the meticulously compiled Lovely, Human, True, Heartfelt: The Letters of Alina Szapocznikow and Ryszard Stanisławski 1948-1971. The volume comprises letters, postcards and telegrams, accompanied by drawings and photographs of Szapocznikow. Only a few letters of Stanisławski’s had been found. They were written shortly after Szapocznikow met Stanisławski in Paris. She came to Paris in the fall of 1947 from Prague, where she ended up after the end of World War II and began studying sculpture. In France she continued her art studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. At that time Stanisławski was taking preparatory courses in French language and had enrolled in the museum studies program at the École du Louvre.