Documentary Aesthetics in the Long 1960s in Eastern Europe and Beyond by ClemensGünther and MatthiasSchwartz, eds. Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics, Volume 67. Leiden: Brill, 2023. 330 pp. $139.00. ISBN 978‐90‐04‐53309‐7

During the 1960s, writers, filmmakers, and artists sought to replace compromised literary and artistic strategies with forms associated with authenticity, sincerity, and the authority of the witness. Documentary Aesthetics in the Long 1960s in Eastern Europe and Beyond presents a collection of thirteen essays examining various instances of documentary aesthetics in this period with an introduction written by the volume’s editors, Clemens Günther and Matthias Schwartz. Contributors include emerging and established scholars from German, American, Swiss, Belgian, Russian, and Austrian universities. The introduction draws on Svetlana Alexievich’s style of oral histories and testimonial literature to establish the collection’s focus on documentary aesthetics in literature and films of the 1960s. Günther and Schwartz base their definition of documentary aesthetics on stylistic and discursive developments in post-Stalinist Soviet literature and literary discourse. The introduction next differentiates between documentary aesthetics in the 1960s and the earlier “literature of fact” and avant-garde literary theory from the 1920s. The volume’s editors define the difference in terms of temporality: the earlier, avant-garde documentary approach focused on the present and the imagined future, whereas the documentary turn of the 1960s was part of a broader reexamination of the past. The introduction goes further and defines the international connections between Eastern European artists interested in documentary art and their contemporaries with similar interests in West Germany and the United States. Developing out of presentations at the international conference “‘Firsthand Time.’ Documentary Aesthetics in the Long 1960s,” held at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin, January 16–18, 2020, seven of the thirteen chapters focus on literature, two on poetry, two on film, one on art, and one on theater; one chapter discusses both Alexander Kluge’s films and literary texts. One of the key concepts discussed across several contributions to the volume refers to “ego-documents,” a term developed by the Dutch historian Jacques Presser to define personal experiences and the perspective of historical actor-individuals in the form of self-narratives and self-testimonies. Günther and Schwartz organized the chapters into four thematically defined sections. The first group focuses on a selection of authors that utilized documentary strategies to investigate historical tragedies, featuring chapters by Franziska Thun-Hohenstein on the Soviet writer Varlam Shalamov, Natasha Gordinsky on the Soviet-Jewish author Aleksandra Brushtein, Tatjana Petzer on the Yugoslav-Jewish writer Danilo Kiš, and Gunther Martens on the German author and filmmaker Kluge. These authors present a range of formal and narrative strategies by combining fiction and nonfiction elements in literary texts such as Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales (1954–early 1970s), Brushtein’s autobiographical trilogy The Road Leads Off into the Distance (1955–59), Kiš’s Early Sorrows (1969) and The Tomb of Boris Davidovich: Seven Chapters of a Common History (1976), and Kluge’s Close Histories (1962) and The Battle (1964). These chapters offer persuasive readings of documentary aesthetics and each writer’s distinct engagement with history and fiction. The volume’s second section includes two chapters focusing on film: the first on the use of documentary strategies in the autobiographic and essayistic films of the Lithuanian-American filmmaker Jonas Mekas and the second examining the juxtaposition of nonfiction and fiction footage in two films by the Soviet-Jewish director Mikhail Kalik. Christian Zehnder presents a detailed reading of Mekas’s diary films, which examines the interplay of handheld camerawork and avant-garde montage in Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (also known as Walden) (1969), Reminiscences from a Journey to Lithuania (1972), and Lost, Lost, Lost (1976). In her chapter, Elena Nekrasova draws on Viktor Shklovsky’s definition of poetic cinema from the 1920s to formally define Kalik’s Goodbye, Boys! (1964) and To Love… (1968) as examples of 1960s post-Stalinist poetic cinema that combined nonfiction and archival footage with staged, fictional scenes. The third chapter in this section by Matthias Schwartz examines the writing of two Polish journalists, Hanna Krall and Ryszard Kapuściński, who used distinct documentary approaches in their reportage writing about Soviet Uzbekistan in the late 1960s. The third section presents three chapters that examine how artists utilized documentary strategies to examine details of everyday life. Anna Hodel’s chapter on Soviet documentary theater of the 1960s provides a comprehensive overview of the discourse on documentary aesthetics in Soviet theater by examining how critics, playwrights, and theater directors conceptualized this emerging stylistic development. Georg Witte defines the “poor aesthetics” of Ian Satunovskii’s poetry as a return to the elementary dynamics of poetic language. Sarah A. Burgos compares the incorporation of copies and the process of copying in conceptual works of art such as the Xerox Book (1968) to the clandestine production of Soviet samizdat texts and their physical form. The final section features three chapters that examine literary and artistic works, which address social issues. Anja Tippner’s contribution to the volume discusses Frida Vigdorova’s documentation of Joseph Brodsky’s trial. Ilya Kukulin’s chapter investigates how poets such as Mikhail Sokovnin called into question the documentary premise of a shared reality. Renate Wöhrer’s chapter focuses on Hans Haacke’s landmark conceptual art project Shapolsky’s et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971), which compiled photographs of Manhattan apartment buildings with data to document the neglect and exploitation perpetrated by slumlords. This volume expands the study of discursive, stylistic, and theoretical developments in twentieth century European and American art, literature, and film. From the perspective of the current “post-truth” era, this volume examines works of art by artists who largely presumed that it was possible to compose a more authentic and sincere depiction of the world.

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